Corporate Real Estate Management as Global Competence Center

Real Estate often represents a major part of company assets. In European companies, Real Estate makes up an average of 6 per cent of total assets, while the importance of the property has barely changed in the last decade. The real estate ownership ratio of German companies for example, has been relatively constant at 70 percent. However, the environment in which the companies operate has changed significantly over the years. This vastly changing and increasingly international environment provides companies with new challenges in Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM), which have to be mastered by flexible and simple structures containing ìlearning characterî. In a first step, existing forms of organizational models for Corporate Real Estate Management have been determined and structured through various expert interviews and years of consulting experience in the market. It became obvious that on the market many types of Corporate Real Estate Management models exist, which mainly differ in terms of centralization vs. decentralization of core processes, responsibilities and competences. In a second step, an evaluation was conducted about the advantages and disadvantages of the existing CREM models; furthermore the models were assessed regarding whether they fulfilled their requirements. Moreover, organizational models were identified which combine rising production requirements concerning the property, increasing number of trends and innovations within the Real Estate market as well as combining and fulfilling the structural challenges in an international context. An essential part of the study is to rate the individual advantages and disadvantages of each model and to show how a global Corporate Real Estate Management can be built in an efficient and standardized manner.