10 performance metrics reveal corporate real estate’s true value

Corporate real estate (CRE) leadership is now under increasing pressure to demonstrate value to the enterprise in ways that go beyond saving money. They face expectations to showcase CRE’s impact on a range of organization-wide objectives.

This shift, together with powerful performance insights made possible with the latest data and analytics has prompted a radical rethink of real estate metrics. Identifying key performance indicators that clearly show the added value CRE creates for the enterprise and how it contributes to the overall business has become an imperative.

Corporate real estate metrics that matter

With the right expertise and business intelligence tools at their disposal, CRE teams can identify and measure real estate metrics that allow them to answer the questions that stakeholders are asking. We’ve categorized several of the high-level metrics that organizations should be developing a strategy to measure:

1. Employee experience – CRE teams can measure the relationship between the efficient resolution of work orders and the workplace experience of employees.

2. Facilities management – Helpful metrics to measure surrounding facilities repairs and maintenance include frequency of emergency repairs, repair backlogs, customer feedback, and invoicing. Analyzing these metrics provide forward-looking insights.

3. Financial – Comparing metrics like budget forecasts versus actual spend—both on the portfolio and individual property level—allows teams to identify and prevent overspending or under spending.

4. Lease administration – Portfolio managers need easy visibility into metrics like upcoming critical lease events, active vs. inactive leases, and lease details to address short-term concerns and to set expectations about future requirements.

5. Occupancy – CRE teams gain an advantage when they can quickly identify properties where occupancy density is out of alignment with expectations, and measure how occupancy metrics are changing over time.

6. Portfolio agility – Access to the right metrics enable portfolio managers to ensure that the real estate portfolio meets the needs of the organization’s business goals and objectives. These metrics can include occupancy, leasing transactions, construction projects, and expenses and impact decisions on portfolio size, cost, occupancy, and operations.

7. Project management – Project managers need defined metrics to effectively manage all the phases of a task from initial establishment to handover and project closure, ensuring that projects stay within scope, on schedule, and within budget.

8. Transaction management – Defining metrics to measure the efficiency of real estate transactions also makes it easier to draw attention to transactions that require unique attention or new processes.

9. Space management – Businesses must track space utilization and occupational density metrics to help determine how their space is being used and what their future space requirements will be. Market comparisons can enable businesses to track their performance even more effectively by enabling them to benchmark the performance of their space versus their peers.

10. Energy and sustainability – Real estate has a major role to play in achieving an organization’s sustainability targets. Metrics like waste and water consumption, as well as reviewing the building’s overall energy consumption, are necessary to meet with sustainability standards, manage their energy costs, and cut carbon emissions.

Go deeper with market benchmarks

The business impact of leveraging modern corporate real estate metrics is amplified when those metrics can be compared to the market in which competitors and peers are also operating. Even more value can be generated if those market benchmarks can be drawn from across multiple market segments and indicators.

This is one of the more unique advantages of JLL Azara, a purpose-built CRE data and insights platform that allows users to compare their metrics against JLL’s proprietary market data.