Best Practices Award

IDRC?s Best Practices Research Award recognizes excellence in the practice of corporate real estate in selected areas identified by the International Development Research Council. The objective? To identify and promote best-in-class examples of how firms are meeting the major challenges facing corporate real estate practitioners today.

Tenant representative firm CLW Realty Group seeks to creatively improve the value-added performance of the corporate real estate function. In its work with Aetna, for example, CLW was able to help the corporate real estate unit expand services and improve customer satisfaction, while simultaneously reducing costs.

Louis Varsames, principal and President of CLW Realty Group, Tampa, Fla.

Talk about your sports metaphor as a guide to conducting business. The four founding partners at CLW Realty Group lived the model as Harvard football teammates 20 years ago. Today, they?re a world-class team in real estate tenant representation. Just ask client Aetna Life and Casualty, Inc., who nominated CLW for its service delivery best practices. The judges agreed, adding that the CLW?s ?creativity and innovation leads the way toward value-added performance.? CLW Realty Group?s recipe for successful service delivery is more a philosophy than a set of specific activities that constitute ?best practices,? say company officials.

It starts with an extension of the team concept, explains CLW President Louis Versames. ?CLW is not set up as a brokerage company, but rather more like an accounting or law firm that draws its best work from direct principal involvement.
?Because we all come from different backgrounds, we are more appealing to our clients, more able to meet the diversity of their needs,? says Versames.

In addition to having the knowledge, CLW?s ability to bring it all together as a team is crucial to their success. Ron Bluestein, former managing director of corporate real estate at Aetna, says CLW became part of the firm?s team, ?to the point where clients don?t differentiate in their behavior with Aetna?s staff or those from CLW.?

CLW was among five tenant representative firms assigned a ?book of business? and the challenge to help reduce Aetna?s occupancy costs by 30 percent, US$70 million, over a four-year period. Aetna has since reduced the number of tenant representative firms to just two: a much larger national firm and CLW.

Due to their demonstrated importance to Aetna?s business units, CLW was chosen to lead the Aetna HealthCare Service Center consolidation initiative, the largest assignment given to a single tenant representative firm. The project to reposition 44 existing offices into eight mega-centers involves millions of square feet and an estimated $140 million savings.

CLW has always gone beyond identifying the usual real estate solution, such as ?short-listing? available properties,? Bluestein reports. ?They have been creative in their thinking and partnering with local Aetna managers to identify non-traditional real estate alternatives.

?A light-industrial park for back-office functions, an old retail complex ripe for retrofit, or a financially advantageous sublease — these options take hard work to uncover and a commitment to match real estate with business strategies,? recounts Bluestein. ?It?s this kind of hard work that creates sustainable service value.?

In addition, Aetna benefits from CLW?s ?reputation as being ethical, fair and sensitive to all parties involved in a transaction,? Bluestein explains. ?As tenants, we must live with a landlord for five, seven or even 10 years. The lingering bad taste of negotiating sessions gone bad can hurt business operations when tenant/landlord relations are poor. CLW has never positioned Aetna to feel disadvantaged once a lease has been finalized.?

Finally, says Bluestein, ?the Aetna/CLW experience is a model for others.?