Evidence Domain

Corporate Real Estate

What it studies

The management of real estate as a corporate resource: portfolio strategy, transactions, lease economics, location decisions, and the alignment of property holdings with business strategy. Its research tradition — CoreNet, RICS, academic CRE research — studies how organisations plan, acquire, operate and dispose of the space they occupy.

Why it matters

CRE is workplace strategy's institutional home and economic engine: lease events trigger projects, portfolio economics bound scenarios, and CRE governance is where workplace decisions meet capital allocation. The discipline's own evolution — from cost-centre transaction management toward demand-led portfolio strategy — is the institutional version of this methodology's argument.

Questions it answers
  • How should the portfolio respond to measured and projected demand?
  • What do lease events, market conditions and flexibility options imply for timing and structure?
  • How do location decisions interact with workforce, commute and talent geography?
  • What does workplace evidence change in portfolio economics?
Evidence sources
  • CRE research literature and industry bodies (RICS, CoreNet)
  • Portfolio, lease and transaction data
  • Market intelligence (read as interested testimony)
  • The demand-supply alignment tradition from DEGW onward
Design and policy implications

Portfolio decisions run through the same evidence chain as workplace decisions; flexibility priced as option value, not overhead; lease events used as strategy triggers rather than deadline panics; location strategy tested against workforce geography evidence.

Related methods
Common misuse

Cost-per-square-metre monoculture: portfolio optimisation that treats space as undifferentiated expense, invisible to the demand evidence that distinguishes productive space from waste. The savings are real and the damage arrives later, unattributed.

Further research

Portfolio strategy under structural hybrid uncertainty — how much space, where, on what flexibility terms — is the discipline's defining current question, with practice running ahead of research.