“The embrace of benchmarking by corporate real estate professionals coincides with the increasing strategic role that the CREs are playing in corporate boardrooms gives them a little bit more ammunition,” Anderson says. “On a whole, though, we just need better systems and better industry standards.”

Sixty percent of respondents revealed that they also benchmark against competitors. However, less than half of all respondents were able to identify how they captured competitor data. For those that do collect such data, the process tends to be ad hoc and informal, utilizing personal networks, Internet searches, and common service providers.

“Existing benchmarking tools out are not well established,” Anderson says. “We don’t have an industry standard that’s been used year after year to allow people to make comparisons. A lot of people have tried very hard and have made a lot of good effort, but there still hiccups.”

On the environmental benchmarking front, only approximately one-third of the respondents are collecting environmental metrics for portfolio benchmarking. For those corporations that are collecting the data, measures focus around CO2 and water consumption and the levels of non-recycled waste.

“The low level of environmental benchmarking is at odds with the sustainability agenda, which is becoming an increasingly important factor in the development of corporate real estate strategies,” says Stephen Fleetwood, associate director at global real estate adviser DTZ.

Although some organizations are at least collecting CO2, water and waste data, Fleetwood says the environmental agenda is rapidly evolving and companies need to start looking at other metrics, such as how much of their power requirements are met by renewable energy and the impact of travel to work patterns and modes.

“The bottom line is CREs want to know how they can efficiently and accurately provide an estimated costs for one facility versus another,” Anderson says. “They want to know what their peers in the industry are doing and they want to know that the information they are looking at is reliable. That’s the difficult part. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get all of reliable information together.”