Managing University Real Estate Portfolios: Generating Management Information for Performance Based Portfolio Strategies and Real Estate Decisions

Ten years ago Dutch universities became owners of their real estate portfolios. Their real estate portfolios contain many academic buildings and laboratories. Some of the universities own (monumental) buildings in historical inner cities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Groningen, Maastricht) and most of them have large real estate portfolios, both in terms or gross floor area and in terms of land property. Together they own as much as 4,5 million square meters (equals 48.5 million square feet) gross floor area and 4000 acres of land. Ever since the universities have dealt with many corporate real estate (CRE) issues: adding value to strategic management, coping with diminishing public (financial) support, improving customer satisfaction and managing many complicated building projects. Meanwhile developments in higher education and research created a very dynamic context with many uncertainties. Corporate real estate managers of all 13 Dutch universities joined forces to discuss the opportunities and threats of their new responsibilities and to generate more management information for their own situation. Delft University of Technology was asked to assist them with research projects that combined theory and practice - in an international context of managing university real estate portfolios ñ and has done that for more than 5 years now. This paper summarizes the results of 5 years of research on managing university real estate portfolios. It emphasises on the latest results (2004/2005) that focus on CRE-performance measurement in general and on benchmarking costs in relation to quality and use of buildings and real estate (data analysis in February/March 2005) in particular. The paper will contain theories ñ applied to universities but relevant for CREM in general ñ and will include results of quantitative and qualitative surveys, both on portfolio level and on (building) project level. Conclusions will concentrate on methods for measuring performance of CREM and for generating management information for CRE-managers to communicate and negotiate with policy makers, strategic planners, controllers, building users and parties in construction management.