Corporate Real Estate's Shifting Landscape

DENVER—As the corporate landscape has changed over the past decade, so have real estate advisory firms' roles, which have become less transactional and more transformational, Colliers International's executive managing director, strategy and innovation, Chris Zlocki, tells GlobeSt.com. We spoke exclusively with Zlocki about the shifting landscape and how his team solves problems creatively for corporate clients.

GlobeSt.com: How has the broker's role changed with corporate clients over the years?

Zlocki: There's been a shift in what's happening in corporate real estate. In the past, when a corporate client was hiring an advisory firm, they were looking for transaction advisory services. But in recent years, there's been a shifting mindset from a transactional way of thinking to a more transformational approach. Clients are being asked to solve more-complex business questions around topics such as enterprise growth, labor availability, location strategy and cost reduction, and they need to think more creatively about how to approach the business. Our strategy and innovation team is focused on helping clients with those needs.

Second, corporate outsourcing is a trend that is here to stay and companies aren't growing their real estate departments. They have limited resources to answer the questions you used to be able to answer with a more-robust team. They turn to us to think about some of those more complex questions about organization, place, scale and size, and they have increased the importance of helping them with their business strategy and portfolio management. Because of resource pressures, they really need help from an outsourced provider. Our team helps corporate clients improve their business and portfolio performance and show their CEO results that impact their company. Real estate is a key business driver within an enterprise; our work helps to emphasize that it is not just a cost center but a value-driven proposition for heads of real estate.

GlobeSt.com: How does your team provide this type of service to corporate clients?

Zlocki: The main goal of the strategy and innovation team is to be able to help clients look at the alignment of business strategy to their real estate portfolios and offer proactive portfolio planning and implementation solutions. Are they in the right places? What are the expansion and growth opportunities? How do they measure their performance? Our team takes a management-consulting approach, looking at a company's business first then providing options to improve footprint solutions. We help clients rationalize their footprint and create the best workplace of the future to align with their employees' needs, helping them attract and retain employees.

GlobeSt.com: Give us an example of how you helped a client solve a problem in a creative manner.

Zlocki: Real estate is a long-term decision, but business is moving in a quarterly pattern. Rather than being set on one solution, we're always looking for options to help the client meet that need.

Colliers utilizes its business analytics platform, Colliers 360, to quickly and effectively analyze a company's portfolio in order to understand the key business metrics that effect the enterprise such as market dynamics, total cost of occupancy, locations patterns and metro-plan strength.

For one particular tech client, we proactively analyzed and helped them rationalize their portfolio by aligning their business strategy with their portfolio strength and helped them right size to their future business by reducing their footprint by 40%. They had cost goals they needed to achieve, and they were able to leverage it by thinking this way. They were able to impact the scale of their real estate portfolio and shift their mandate from a North American to a global mandate.

GlobeSt.com: How have you built out your team to meet clients' needs?

Zlocki: We've hired two senior experts: Dr. Martha (Marti) O'Mara to lead our consulting practice and Keith Perske who heads up our workplace innovation team. Marti is one of the pioneers in using analytics in corporate real estate to impact change and  brings with her best-in-class innovative processes that have impacted over two billion square feet of portfolio change with her clients. Keith is focused on the future business needs and cultural impacts of how a company should work and occupy space. Keith has over 25 years of experience leading solutions on both the corporate and real estate advisory side. We use the term “Place Strategy” to describe the integration of portfolio strategy and workplace innovation. We believe you can't separate the question of where a portfolio is located and how much space you need given the way trends are changing with regards to work styles, shifting demographics, mobility and technology. Marti and Keith lead companies in determining what their target strategy should be regarding location and occupancy plans. They help them look at their entire portfolio and make better decisions about their business relative to real estate.

Our strategic vision is to align what corporate real estate executives need from their service providers with best-in-class talent to help them consider the future of their business and the impact on their real estate requirements. This is key to how our group was built and it aligns with our broader client-centric Occupier Services strategy. Through senior executive commitment to investing in our client services, we were able to recruit Marti and Keith who are a great fit and offer a competitive advantage to our clients.  

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