How to Nail Your Corporate Real Estate Resize

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Did you know that many real estate owners are keeping a lot of unused spaces, hoping for a market rebound? However, resizing the real estate portfolio seems the most reasonable solution for now, especially with the recent job cuts and foreseeable economic downshift.

When it comes to real estate resizing, you are looking at either dropping your real estate space or keeping it but optimizing.

Settling for any of these options isn’t an easy feat.

For most businesses, the decision to resize or not is often murky. This is because many corporates don’t know what size suits them. It becomes even worse when you don’t have the necessary information to figure it out.

So, how do you nail your corporate real estate resize effectively?

This article looks at some simple ways to ensure you get it right when resizing your real estate portfolio.

Why Should You be Worried about Getting Real Estate Resizing Wrong?

Fast thing first – why should you care about keeping the right corporate real estate portfolio size?

Having the wrong real estate portfolio size is costly, whether you have lower or high employee occupancy than reality. And, in most cases, you are likely to consider either getting rid of your space or keeping it.

The impacts of both options are dire.

If you have a lower employee occupancy than the reality, you may be tempted to reduce the office too quickly. Such a decision can leave you with an overcrowded office space, leading to safety and health risks and poor employee experience.

Additionally, you will incur a lot of costs in later expansions when you need more space to grow your team.

On the other hand, you may decide to keep your office if you have a higher employee occupancy than is necessary. In this case, you will have empty office space, creating a poor employee experience and sunk costs on maintenance, utilities, and rent.

In both scenarios, you will have a lot of costs and expenses to deal with. Such expenses will sap revenue, which you could use for development, hiring, and innovation.

How to Get Real Estate Resizing Right

Whether you are struggling with a long list of buildings or considering scrapping some or renewing others, your goal is to reduce costs and maximize the rate of return – without compromising the employees’ experience.

Having a great workplace strategy can help you resize successfully. It will help you control how you open up more floors as the team grows, revamp your office design to allow for more collaboration and keep tabs on your real estate space use.

The right workplace strategy can help you make the right real estate resize decisions.

Let’s explore how to get your real estate resizing right with a workplace strategy.

1. Estimate Your Space Usage

The first step towards getting your real estate resizing right is measuring the current use of your space by the employees.

If you use the usual methods, such as estimation through badge data, surveys, or eyeballing, you will not get the right picture of how employees are using the current space. Such data only shows whether or not the employees have been coming to the office.

All you need is data showing your occupancy details in real-time. You can get this data from Wi-Fi signals and workplace sensors. These will show you the exact areas of the office where employees operate each day. That way, you can establish which offices and desks are not being used so you can do away with them.

2. Establish the Need for the Real Estate Space

Whether you plan to keep and optimize or drop your office will depend on its current significance. Do you understand how, why, what, or when your employees use your office space?

Evaluate the importance of your office by looking at the following:

  • The time employees come to the office
  • Areas and floors heavily occupied
  • Reasons for coming into the office – quiet workspaces, easier communication, or in-person meetings
  • How are the individuals in the office use the workspace

Understanding these occupancy trends and patterns can help you decide how much space is enough for you.

3. Optimize the Right Size

The next step to getting your resize decision right is evaluating space for optimization. Here, you focus on how your buildings and floors are used. The chances are high that some floors and buildings are not used optimally and there are others not used at all.

Such information should help you make the right decision on which spaces to optimize. Of course, this comes after determining the size that is ideal for you. If out of four floors, the total occupancy is only 25%, you have a lot of unused space, so you can consider optimizing.

This move will reduce the costs you were spending on lighting and heating and, at the same time, create a more social work environment. If your data indicates an occupancy level of 25% across three office buildings, you should resize by merging them.

4. Redesign Your Office Space

You will not get the ideal real estate size overnight. There is a lot that goes into determining the perfect office size. Thus, it is advisable to iterate your workplace strategy as your employees and business evolve.

Depending on your office needs and use, you can consider being deliberate about the size of space and number of floors.

When you evaluate your office needs and occupancy, you may find that you don’t need to let go of any room. All you may need is to revamp the office design to create more spaces for collaboration.

Get Started Today!

There you have it – a brief overview of how to keep the right real estate portfolio size. You need the correct data and information to determine whether you should drop or optimize your real estate space.

With the right workplace strategy, you are assured of keeping suitable office space while at the same time reducing costs on facilities management, utilities, and leases. Additionally, you will create an outstanding employee experience, boosting productivity.

We can assist you to resize effectively. Schedule a demo today to learn more about how we can help with your corporate real estate resize.

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