Features

Abstracts of recent major presentations of the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate (CCE) association. “Transforming the Workplace through Value-Based Management,” IDRC Tennessee World Congress Opening General Session, Oct. 18, 1999: Successful value-based CRE management requires understanding corporate goals and how CRE can add value, said Stern Stewart & Co.’s […]

Site Selection: HQ’s real estate holdings are growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to the merger of Frontline Capital’s serviced office unit, VANTAS, with HQ’s properties. What is your role in managing this growth? Ron Adam (right): Completion of the deal is a little ways off, but we’re now in an interim period, which is […]

China’s challenges were center stage at IDRC’s record-breaking March 27-28 Beijing World Congress, “Asia and Corporate Real Estate: Global Infrastructure Rises to the Next Level,” which drew an Asian record turnout of 172. “This Congress was a marker in China’s future development,” said presenter Marcel De Meirleir of Ernst & Young. RIGHT: Lois Dougan Tretiak […]

An increasing number of companies are turning to the concept of “shared services” to lower operating expenses and gain competitive advantage. Briefly defined, shared services consolidates accounting, human resources (HR), real estate and other transactional operations to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. As a management technique, shared services falls into the process-oriented family of […]

Start Me Up: Phoenix, Las Vegas Rated No. 1 Cities Startups are costly, risky business. But Phoenix and Las Vegas are the U.S. locations most conducive to startups’ health, according to new research from Cambridge, Mass.-based Cognetics (www.cogonline.com) (headed by David Birch, considered “the granddaddy of gazelles”). Those two cities are the respective two top […]

Of all the management skills required of today’s corporate real estate manager, none is more elusive than the requirement that he have soothsaying skills. After all, predicting real estate space requirements is central to an organization’s ability to manage physical assets wisely and, as importantly, strategically. Real estate clairvoyance is known in professional circles as […]

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie is on intimate terms with persistence. Just ask Richard Branson. Branson recently announced that he was shopping for an Australian headquarters site. But the Virgin Atlantic chairman already had a location short list that was truly short: It included only Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest, best known cities. Faced with […]

The United Kingdom attracted more new and expanded corporate facilities in 1999 than any other European country. France took the runner-up position, while Germany ranked third. Those results are essentially a photocopy of 1998’s facilities race, in which the same three countries took the top three spots, based on Ernst & Young’s European Investment Monitor […]

Cannes, France: It looks like a second Normandy landing here in the south of France: As Europe’s recovery settles into a long upward leg, U.S. investors are invading, grabbing buildings and real estate securities like they’re going out of style. And that surge will likely multiply the shares of real estate investment companies beginning to […]

What’s upbeat, on the rise and ranges between 4 and 6.3 percent? Answer: current gross domestic product forecasts for four of Southeast Asia’s biggest economies. Indeed, the 2000 economic outlook for Malaysia (where growth over 1999 is expected to hit 6.3 percent), Singapore (6 percent), Thailand (5 percent) and the Philippines (4.5 percent) is decidedly […]