Institutionalization Of Corporate Real Estate Management

The increasing stress of competition force companies to transform their structures and processes in order to increase market shares, maintain their competitive positions, and increase shareholder value. Within this context, many companies already have recognized that corporate real estate (CRE) is an important competitive factor. Therefore, identifying a suitable form of organization and institutionalization of CREM has been one of the major challenges in many companies over the last years. Although, many companies follow similar aims with regard to their real estate assets, and CRE managers are faced with nearly the same challenges within and outside their companies, many different organizational configurations of CREM can be identified in practice. The current state of organizational structure of real estate management is not adequately understood, and it has not been well researched yet which configurations meet the targets best. The aim of this paper therefore is to identify typical organizational forms in practice, and which management philosophy stands behind them. The findings show that two main groups of CREM philosophies exist: the ones where CRE is predominantly strategic-oriented and the others where CREM plays a more supportive role for the core business.