Optimizing Your Real Estate Portfolio

Professional services firms offer specialized advisory services to clients worldwide, including consulting, accounting, legal, engineering and marketing. These firms operate in a rapidly evolving environment characterized by globalization, shifting client expectations, emerging technologies, intense competition from boutique firms and growing insourcing trends. Furthermore, as ownership structures shift from traditional partnerships to private equity investments or publicly traded entities, real estate teams will need to reevaluate their real estate strategies, governance models and cost controls. 

To thrive, organizations must move beyond fragmented local decisions and adopt an integrated real estate strategy. A centralized, data-driven approach not only enhances workplace design and user experience but also drives efficiency, cost savings, and long-term resilience—positioning firms for sustainable growth.

An Integrated Strategy Includes These Components

1. 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.
2. Workplace Strategy, Design and Occupancy Management
   With most professional services firms enabling a hybrid work model, attendance policies and show-up rates vary and may be driven by internal divisions or business lines. Top firms design office environments to retain talent, reinforce culture, and drive productivity. A hospitality-first mindset, backed by ongoing measurement and stakeholder alignment, turns the workplace into a strategic advantage.
3. Mergers and Acquisitions
   Mergers and acquisitions are a core component of professional services organizations’ growth strategies and can accelerate expansion, transform operations, and strengthen core capabilities. Real estate and facilities teams are an essential aspect of the M&A process and are uniquely positioned to drive preparedness, create value and remove uncertainty and risk through comprehensive due diligence. CRE&F teams must be integrated early in the process to identify synergies, streamline assets, and accelerate value creation from newly acquired portfolios.

When managing geographically dispersed portfolios, fragmented decision-making limits visibility and crates challenges in assessing portfolio performance. Centralizing benchmarking, measurement, and reporting across locations enables a real-time, holistic view, empowering CRE&F leaders to optimize resource allocation, enhance operational efficiency, and align real estate strategies with enterprise goals.

Key Success Metrics for Your Real Estate Operations

1. Total Cost of Ownership
   Total cost of ownership (TCO) provides a holistic view of the financial implications associated with each location within a portfolio. Optimizing TCO enables teams to strategically allocate resources and improve budget efficiency, providing greater alignment to organizational priorities and the overall profitability of the business. 
2. Workplace Experience Scores
   A superior workplace experience drives productivity, collaboration, and retention. Systematic measurement—powered by AI and analytics—helps organizations anticipate user needs, adapt space planning, optimize workplace vibrancy and maintain brand consistency across global locations.
3. Workplace Vibrancy Measure
   CBRE research indicates that 80% of current office occupiers have adopted and will sustain hybrid work policies. This systematic change in how, where and when employees work requires rebalancing existing workplaces to create an attractive, in-office experience. Key to this success is achieving an optimal vibrancy threshold, or the level of fullness needed to make the office feel energetic and alive, which is two-thirds or greater. To calculate vibrancy and assess future requirements, CRE teams need to consider a variety of data, including utilization rates, employee engagement scores, attendance projections and capacity modeling.
4. 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.
5. Value Creation From M&A, Divestiture, Private Equity Investment, Split or Consolidation
   Professional services firms often engage in M&A or divestiture activities to expand their capabilities or unlock new sources of sustainable value. Additionally, industry trends indicate a growing trend toward changes in ownership structures, including private equity investments, splits and consolidations. Regardless, measuring pre- and post-restructuring outcomes, including cost savings, space optimization and employee engagement, as part of these activities ensures that real estate decisions accelerate success and deliver measurable business value.
   

To succeed in a highly competitive market shaped by ongoing geopolitical concerns, economic uncertainty and complex client expectations, professional services firms must focus on their core differentiators while ensuring that their real estate strategies are agile, efficient, and employee-centered. CRE&F leaders who drive innovation in workplace and portfolio management can significantly enhance business resilience and competitive positioning.

Best Practices To Overcome Key Real Estate Challenges

1. Redefine Workplace Metrics to Reflect Modern Expectations
   Hybrid work has redefined how real estate is evaluated. While traditional metrics like square footage per person still matter, today’s performance indicators must reflect employee sentiment, engagement, and purpose-driven experiences. CRE&F leaders must expand their view beyond efficiency—prioritizing the elements that drive culture, satisfaction, and long-term retention. The most progressive firms now measure success through a balanced lens: space utilization paired with workplace impact.
2. Use Real Estate as a Catalyst for Enterprise Transformation 
   Real estate is no longer a back-office function—it’s a driver of change. By embedding CRE&F into broader business strategies, professional services firms can uncover opportunities to reduce costs, improve sustainability, elevate experience, and future-proof operations. Integrated real estate solutions enable flexibility at scale, enhance brand equity in competitive markets, and power more agile decision-making during business transformation.
3. Embed Technology and Analytics to Optimize Outcomes
   Advanced analytics and real-time portfolio intelligence give CRE&F leaders the clarity to make faster, more confident decisions. A connected technology platform enables holistic reporting across global portfolios—improving governance, regulatory alignment, capital planning, and service delivery. With the right tools, firms can identify emerging risks, prioritize investments, and drive consistent performance aligned with business goals.

As both a global real estate leader and a professional services organization, CBRE uniquely understands the complexities you face. Our experts deliver tailored, end-to-end real estate solutions that power client outcomes across the asset lifecycle—from advisory and acquisition to valuation, facilities management, leasing, and disposition. Wherever you operate, we combine local expertise with global scale to drive measurable results.

Realizing Value in Your Real Estate Portfolio

1. Integrated Facilities Management
   We connect technology, data and facility maintenance to help professional services organizations optimize processes, reduce unnecessary spend, enhance safety and create truly desirable work environments for top talent. Our extensive expertise spans all facility types and provides a consistent facilities management experience worldwide. Through our Smart FM platform, we deliver virtual maintenance, automated maintenance and dynamic services—all connected with building automation, IoT and data analytics solutions that leverage people, processes and integrated technology. Learn more.
2. Workplace Experience
   Improve employee experience and build loyalty and engagement with Host, our technology solution featuring hospitality-trained experts employed by many of the world’s largest companies and investors. Driven by people and technology, CBRE helps transform the workplace to help people perform, collaborate and thrive. Learn more.
3. Workplace Strategy, Design and Occupancy Management
   Unlock the power of the workplace with user-centered design, delivery and management services that drive business strategy, inspire human performance and increase employee engagement. Our diverse team of experts in workplace strategy, organizational design, change and transformation, design and occupancy management can identify opportunities to reduce and reallocate underutilized space, enhance employee experience, effectively manage through change, and align culture and work processes to deliver exceptional, vibrant places of work—enabling organizations to measure the impact and value of investments made in workplace design and amenities. Learn more.
4. Project and Program Management
   Our dedicated project management team provides the talent and tools to optimize capital investments. As the leading global projects and capital program management firm, our engineers and construction managers are trained to support professional services projects, reduce costs and deliver exceptional quality projects on time. Learn more.
5. 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.
6. 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 organizations can realize insight that leads to greater foresight and better decision-making. Learn more about CBRE’s data and technology platform.