Report
C-Suite Perspectives
Empowering Business Through Real Estate
February 11, 2025 5 Minute Read
Introduction
CBRE's inaugural C-Suite Perspectives: Empowering Business Through Real Estate survey reveals that leaders see real estate as a strategic opportunity with latent potential to deliver value to businesses.
While companies’ appreciation of their real estate is growing, there is still untapped value that real estate can bring to achieving core objectives.
Managed strategically, real estate can be a key enabler to support core business objectives as well as showcasing the company’s brand and vision to its teams, clients, and the broader community. However, it also represents a material cost and so needs to be managed effectively to allow a company to adapt to an increasingly dynamic business environment.
Our survey captures the views of more than 250 C-Suite leaders and their perception of the role that real estate plays within their business.
Leaders are increasingly taking more interest in how real estate can play a wider role and taking advantage of the opportunities it presents.
Overview with Ciaran Bird
Understanding Real Estate’s Contribution to the Business
Explore how real estate can add strategic value and achieve return on investment for your organisation, serving as both an enabler and a critical asset.
Key Themes
Real estate as a strategic tool
Real estate has a key role in enabling C-Suite strategy, and its influence is growing
The business environment facing C-Suite leaders is dynamic and complex at both strategic and tactical levels. Most of the key focus areas identified – including business resilience, cost management, and environmental targets – can be linked closely with real estate.
Real estate is becoming more significant in the eyes of leadership, and today, a majority see it as vital to conveying company’s culture, and important in meeting core business objectives. Organisations with a higher exposure towards offices perceive greater importance than companies with a more industrial-based portfolio.
Looking forward, 50% of respondents see real estate becoming more important over the next three years. CEOs and COOs (63%) and leaders of manufacturing, transport, and logistics firms (>80%) hold this view even more strongly, accepting its potential as generator of business value.
Enabling business resilience
C-Suites want their real estate to enable business resilience
Most C-Suite leaders (>80%) have measures in place to monitor the performance of their real estate portfolios, and real estate plays some role across a wide range of business decision areas – including major strategic initiatives such as acquisitions and business transformation.
C-Suites want real estate to enable business resilience, underpinned by more effective performance metrics. Increased flexibility is the main value-adding change that leaders would like to see from their real estate portfolios – a reflection of the dynamic business environment that can be at odds with real estate’s inflexibility.
C-Suites want to be closer to their company’s real estate decisions
To achieve their goals, C-Suites want to be closer to real estate decisions to drive more effective engagement
Most organisations now have corporate real estate reporting directly to the C-Suite; and half of companies consider that the level of engagement between real estate and the C-Suite has increased over the past three years.
Despite this, only just over half of C-Suite leaders see their engagement with real estate as effective. 76% of C-Suite members want more personal influence or involvement with real estate decisions.
Additional efforts are needed to foster effective engagement between C-Suites and their real estate.
Read the Report
Read the full report and explore how these insights can enhance your real estate strategies.
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