It's a New Age for CRE

Changing demographics have affected the real estate service provider business in a positive way. I joined CoreNet (then Nacore) in 1993 as perhaps one of its youngest members. When I joined Nacore, (in my 20s) there was a 35- to 40-year gap in age between me and most CRE managers. Today I’m in my early 40s and the specific clients I interact with are within six to 10 years of my age and at least two of them are younger.Walk around a CoreNet Summit or during their educational programs these days and you’ll see several young faces.

What happened? Well, many of the older corporate real estate executives retired during the first outsourcing initiatives of the late 1990s. They were replaced by a “new age” of leaders in corporate real estate who come more often from other, unrelated areas within the organization. Our day-to-day contacts are HR directors, engineers, accountants and attorneys. Most of them are not real estate people in the technical sense of the term. They don’t hold real estate licenses and they don’t have real estate on the top of their list of responsibilities. Often, it’s something thrown in because, well…their company fired the real estate guy.

What does this mean for the real estate service provider? Well, because of the reasons mentioned above, these folks approach real estate differently. They have a strong desire to control costs versus treating real estate like it was simply a matter of crossing items off a list. And, because they didn’t grow up in real estate, they tend to have a stronger reliance on an outside “solutions expert.”