Corporate Real Estate Management: A Survey of the Largest French Companies Regarding their Head Office Management Strategies

Over the past years, there has been a growing attention of the business world and of the academic research for corporate real estate management. It has been notably pointed out that real estate is a significant but under managed part of total corporate assets and that it could be source of value for companies.More than half of France's largest firms have restructured their management of corporate real estate expenditures over the past three years as part of a broader strategy to offset rising costs. The Corporate Management Director has emerged as an actor of increasing importance for French firms.To better understand this transformation, we have addressed members of the French Real Estate Directors Association (l'Association des directeurs immobiliers, ADI) and collected the testimonies of 74 Real Estate Directors of large French companies – including 23 CAC40 Index listed companies (the 40 largest stocks trading on Euronext Paris) – who together represent some 2 million m2 of headquarters space and 68 000 sites throughout France, totaling over 78 million m2 in real estate properties overall.This paper reports on the results of this original survey, carried out at the end 2012, which is the first survey to be performed on corporate real estate management in France, especially on the largest companies head office real estate management. Using this pool sample, an exploratory analysis has been run to identify some key factors which can explain the size, the structure and the strategy of corporate real estate units within these companies. To confirm the results observed in the first analysis, statistical hypothesis testing has been then applied.