Real Estate Solutions for Insurance Firms

Optimizing Your Real Estate Portfolio

Navigating Disruption With a Unified Real Estate Strategy

Need a Framework for Operating Your Real Estate Portfolio?

Insurance firms are navigating a wave of disruption—from inflation and climate risk to evolving customer expectations. To respond with agility, real estate strategies must integrate workforce planning, workplace experience, and sustainability goals. By doing so, corporate real estate and facilities (CRE&F) leaders can unlock operational consistency, scalability, and efficiency by aligning their portfolios to support business resilience and growth.

Key Components of an Integrated Real Estate Strategy

Integrated Facilities Management
Consolidating facilities management and real estate services across regions unlocks flexibility and operational efficiency, allowing businesses to more quickly scale service delivery up or down to address shifting needs. Powered by technology and data analytics, this approach supports global consistency while reducing total cost of occupancy across all property types.
Mergers and Acquisitions
M&A offers insurers a path to innovation via technology acquisition. While some insurers develop technology solutions in-house to improve processes like underwriting and claims processing, many firms bolster their capabilities through strategic acquisitions and partnerships with insurtechs. CRE&F teams must be integrated early in the process to identify synergies, streamline assets, and accelerate value creation from newly acquired portfolios.
Digital Transformation
With the rise of hybrid work and AI, CRE&F leaders need to prioritize scalable technology to support portfolio optimization and workplace strategy. Enterprise tech stacks must keep pace with evolving needs, including space consolidation, future data center requirements, enhancing customer interactions, or on-demand offerings through digital channels.
Workforce Planning and Portfolio Strategy
As the needs of the current and future insurance workforce shift, CRE&F teams must adopt an integrated strategy to ensure short-term operational requirements are met while building a long-term vision that aligns business priorities with employee experience. Additionally, these workforce shifts will require real estate teams to rethink their approach to location selection, infrastructure requirements, workplace design and employee amenities.

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Translating Real Estate Performance Into Business Outcomes

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As the insurance industry faces unpredictable forces of disruption, CRE&F teams must move beyond traditional metrics to measure portfolio impact on enterprise goals. Leveraging real-time data improves operational agility, risk mitigation, and workplace experience – shaping a more resilient, future-ready portfolio. A focus on defined KPIs not only shapes the operational landscape but also lays the groundwork for optimizing facility performance.

Key Success Metrics for Your Real Estate Operations

Portfolio Efficiency
Key metrics such as utilization rates, lease terms, cost per square foot, energy use offer a clear lens into portfolio performance. These KPIs inform strategic decisions around consolidation, redesign, and reinvestment. CRE leaders should regularly refine their benchmarking and measurement strategies to adapt to industry or business changes.
Utilization Rate
Effectiveness now trumps efficiency. Utilization rates—more insightful than attendance—reveal how well space supports productivity and collaboration. 79% of CBRE clients target utilization rates of 65% or more, but actual rates lag at around 40% globally. Regularly assessing workplace efficacy metrics like this can help CRE leaders identify opportunities to refine workplace strategies to bolster utilization.
Employee Experience and Engagement Scores
Leading insurance carriers increasingly rank workplace experience as a key factor in real estate success—and, according to a recent CBRE study, employee engagement/satisfaction now ranks as the top CRE performance metric. KPIs like Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS), sentiment scores, and employee retention rates provide insights into what drives satisfaction—and where to invest in creating compelling workplace experiences.
Total Cost of Occupancy (TCO)
As insurance firms often manage large real estate portfolios comprising a mix of leased and owned locations, CRE&F teams must measure KPIs that directly impact the total cost of occupancy (TCO). Tracking TCO across leased and owned assets reveals opportunities to reduce spend and improve ROI. By analyzing rent, utilities, maintenance, taxes and space utilization, leaders can uncover inefficiencies, renegotiate leases and right-size the portfolio to support business goals.

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Enabling Enterprise Outcomes Through Corporate Real Estate

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In a dynamic global insurance market, minimizing risk and building trust are critical to navigating economic uncertainty and the current geopolitical landscape. CRE’s role has expanded from operational oversight to strategic enablement. Real estate teams can meet this mandate by rethinking team structure, embracing technology, and building change-ready cultures. The result: portfolios that support performance, transparency, and trust.

CRE Best Practices for Lasting Impact

Align CRE Organizational Structure to Business Goals
Modern CRE organizations are restructuring to reflect evolving priorities—emphasizing agility, clear governance, and skills that drive enterprise value. With 75% of insurance CRE executives prioritizing business enablement, many are considering reorganization within the next year. Mid-size carriers are more urgently adapting to industry trends, while larger carriers proceed more cautiously. To ensure success, CRE leaders should maintain transparent communication and invest in training to support new processes, minimizing disruption and turnover.
Activate Real-Time Reporting
Connected data platforms provide end-to-end portfolio visibility, supporting everything from capital prioritization to compliance and sustainability. A single-pane-of-glass view of your facilities and assets supports informed decision-making through reliable reporting that mitigates risk, models scenarios, enables improved capital prioritization and ensures optimized operations and service delivery.
Embrace a Top-Down Approach To Change Management
Transparent communication and clear objectives are essential. In M&A or transformation scenarios, proactive change management ensures adoption, alignment, and business continuity. Effective change management strategies include thorough assessments of current processes, systems and resources to identify improvement areas and increase buy-in by building trust, transparency and ownership of the new process. Training or upskilling on new processes, technologies or tools will ensure employees can quickly adapt.
Realign Real Estate Portfolio to Enable Business Strategy
Many insurance company real estate portfolios include legacy assets and campuses that do not align with key business strategies, such as attracting and retaining talent, right-sized operations and matching the space with the type of work conducted in each location. Reshaping or optimizing a portfolio can help organizations reduce excess space and associated costs, free up capital and ensure workplace investments will enable the firm to achieve its future goals.

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Operational Excellence with CBRE

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CBRE brings deep industry knowledge and proven solutions tailored for insurers navigating transformation. We know firsthand that the insurance sector is at a critical point with converging drivers for the mandate to transform. C-suites in these institutions are once again calling on CRE&F leaders and teams to be vital strategic partners as businesses reevaluate the role and structure of the portfolio and workspace in achieving long-term success. Whether supporting global portfolios or regional needs, our platform adapts to your goals—enabling operational excellence, cost control, and stakeholder alignment.

Optimize Your Real Estate Delivery Model

Integrated Facilities Management
Our global operating model is hard services-led and empowered by technology with the ability to leverage the best supplier partners. Strengthened by our rigorous training program, facilities teams can expertly manage day-to-day operations and maintenance of facilities infrastructure, as well as IT hardware and software. We help clients achieve increased efficiency and operational reliability while reducing carbon and lowering cost with connected building automation, IoT, and data analytics solutions that leverage people, processes and integrated technology. Learn more about integrated facilities management.
Data and Technology
CBRE offers enterprise-grade technology across the entire real estate lifecycle. We integrate, build and scale with our clients to pilot real-world technologies that become industry standard. Seeing over 36 billion data points from over 300 global sources, CBRE connects data at scale, so you can deliver insight-driven transformations, and ultimately foresight of future trends in financial and professional services industry. Learn more about CBRE's data and technology platform.
Procurement and Sourcing
Our global supplier network ensures competitive pricing, resilience, and access to best-in-class resources. Our global scale enables strategic partnerships with industry-leading suppliers, driving innovation and creating value for our clients. We continuously evaluate market pricing through competitive sourcing events and benchmarking to deliver cost savings. Learn more.
Workplace Experience
Improve employee experience and promote loyalty and engagement with Host, our bespoke hospitality solution. Experts, trained in people-focused hospitality, deliver custom, technology-driven solutions for a number of the world’s largest companies and investors. Keeping people at the center of enabling your business, CBRE helps transform the workplace to help teams perform, collaborate, and thrive. Learn more about workplace experience services.
Project and Program Management
Our team uses an optimized service delivery process to manage every aspect of your project’s budget, schedule and scope and protect your interests throughout the entire real estate journey. The Project & Program Management Office (PMO) acts as an extension of a client's organization to standardize and provide project-related governance across a defined program, geography or region. The PMO also facilitates or directly coordinates the sharing of resources, methodologies, tools, and techniques. This centralized control results in a collaborative environment with consistent project execution, supply chain management, rigorous fiscal governance, and a commitment to innovation. Learn more about CBRE's project management solutions.
Sustainability and Energy Management
We help enterprises optimize their energy performance through strategic and turnkey solutions to support carbon reduction and net zero commitments to achieve their sustainability goals. Build a comprehensive roadmap for your sustainability goals, from establishing a baseline of comprehensive energy, emissions, water and waste data to setting targets and developing an actionable plan. Learn more about CBRE's sustainability solutions.
Organizational Change and Transformation
We enable leaders, teams, and organizations to achieve outcomes, improve performance and create a culture of continuous improvement to effectively manage change. Transformation achieves substantial leaps in business performance by maturing core capabilities, enhancing customer and employee experience and improving your organizational efficiency and effectiveness. This journey begins by understanding the challenges facing your business today and aligning your leadership team around these challenges. Learn more.

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