User-orientation in the European Corporate Real Estate Management - An empirical study

Although properties are not an element of core-business in non-property-companies a significant amount of capital is locked-up in corporate real estate (CRE) by European firms. This awareness gave in the early 1990s the impetus for the trend to a much more professional Corporate Real Estate Management. Indicators like cost efficiency and space efficiency were getting more and more important and led to ìguidelinesî by the increasing shareholder value concept. In the end, the perspective of the owner dominated the Corporate Real Estate business for a certain period of time. That this dominance of the owner-perspective over the users-perspective has been tailed off was already be shown in a previous study called ìCREM 2010: What is the role played by the users?î in the last year by Sonja Weiland and Andreas Pfn¸r. This survey showed that Corporate Real Estate Managers realized the importance of users` satisfaction with their working environment. It is estimated by the questioned Corporate Real Estate Managers that the leverage of a better working environment of the employee productivity is roundabout 13 %. Their main objective - shown by this survey - was the best possible support and service for the real estate users to facilitate their performance. The space-users shall be enabled to work efficiently and effectively. For this reason, the impact on corporate success by a corporate real estate is additionally pushed by a professional user-orientation. The study being presented is based on the data collected for the previous study CREM 2010: 97 Corporate Real Estate Managers of German companies with more than 10.000 employees were questioned. But the focus of this follow-up study is shifting from identifying the status quo to analysing the coherencies. Therefore multivariate methods are chosen to examine correlations between variables (e.g. characteristics of the company, satisfaction of the users, sourcing decisions, etc.), to identify factors affecting the success and to identify clusters of management strategies in order to give a hint for development potential. Aim of this follow-up study is to analyze the significance of user-related corporate real estate management for the employeesí productivity. Finally a target-concept of managing and controlling the real estate portfolio will be created considering user-orientation as part of it.