Real Estate Economics
The economics of property: value, cost, markets, lease structures, investment appraisal, option value and the financial logic of holding, acquiring and disposing of space. For workplace strategy, its relevant branch is occupier economics — what space costs organisations and what financial logic should govern the commitment.
Real estate is typically the second-largest cost after people, and its commitments are long, lumpy and hard to reverse — which makes the economics of flexibility, timing and reversal central to scenario quality. The discipline also supplies the business-case grammar (capex, opex, NPV, cost per employee) through which workplace strategy speaks to CFOs, and the sharper concepts (option value, reversal cost) most business cases omit.
- What does each scenario genuinely cost — capital, operating, and the options it forecloses?
- What is flexibility worth here, priced rather than asserted?
- What are the reversal costs of each commitment, and which are effectively irreversible?
- How does workplace value enter the appraisal alongside workplace cost?
- Real estate finance and investment appraisal literature
- Lease, market and transaction data
- Real options research (the economics of flexibility and irreversibility)
- The organisation's own cost structure and the demand evidence that differentiates productive space from waste
Scenarios costed with reversal costs and option values, not just headline savings; flexibility priced as an asset class decision rather than an overhead complaint; business cases carrying the value side (attraction, retention, enablement) at evidence-supported strength; lease events treated as strategic option points on the assumption register's calendar.
Scenario Development
The construction and comparison of plausible futures — baseline, conservative, ambition-led, growth, portfolio-reduction and culture-led — with their spatial, financial and risk consequences.
Workplace Strategy
The consolidation of the entire methodology into the decision document: rationale, evidence base, ambition, criteria, trade-offs, selected scenario, business case, concept, roadmap, governance and measurement.
Project Definition Initiation
Establish why the organisation is considering workplace change and what decision actually needs to be made.
Sharing Ratio
The evidence-based determination of desk and setting sharing — derived from workforce demand, attendance rhythm and peak structure, with its risk scenarios and change implications made explicit.
Savings myopia: appraisals that count the avoided rent precisely and the organisational cost not at all — the portfolio reduction whose damage to connection and capability arrives later, unattributed, in someone else's budget line. Symmetrically: workplace value claims asserted without evidence, which discredit the legitimate value case.
Quantifying workplace value — the productive contribution of space quality, as opposed to its cost — remains the occupier economics problem; current methods range from promising to promotional.