When making commercial real estate decisions, what is actually at stake?
A company’s real estate impacts its efficiency, productivity, flexibility, culture, image and ability to recruit and retain employees. To the extent that your business objectives drive your company’s real estate and the two are properly aligned, your lease is an asset. If, on the other hand, your business must adapt to your real estate, your lease is a liability. Numerous steps can and should be taken, in advance of negotiations, to ensure that your next lease is an asset. • Define your company’s culture. • Engage an architect to help establish space standards and conduct a programmatic analysis of your space needs. • Benchmark your space standards against the rest of your industry. The savings associated with these exercises often dwarfs the savings associated with even a properly timed negotiation. Consider an example. Based on your preliminary work with an architect, you determine that you can increase the productivity among a subset of employees by as much as 5 percent by restackin
