The COVID-19 pandemic is posing an unprecedented global challenge to social and economic life. This resulted in many corporations struggling for survival and exploring alternative strategic paths (Seetharaman, 2020). Additionally, these remote-work experiences triggered the reth
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The COVID-19 pandemic is posing an unprecedented global challenge to social and economic life. This resulted in many corporations struggling for survival and exploring alternative strategic paths (Seetharaman, 2020). Additionally, these remote-work experiences triggered the rethinking of their future office use and space (Cushman & Wakefield, 2020).
The strategic execution of the real estate portfolio and the alignment with the business strategy is considered crucial for organizations in order to create maximum added value (Scheffer, Singer and Meerwijk , 2006). As the pandemic is expected to create a new normal and changed the demand for office space, this indicates that the current corporate office portfolio is expected to not be aligned to their future demand. Therefore, the aim of this research is to provide large corporations within different sectors within the Netherlands with a strategy to realign their real estate portfolio to their future post-pandemic priorities. This in order to maintain competitiveness and create a sustainable built environment by addressing the mismatch that could develop overtime.
An empirical research is conducted, in which the changes in demand of nine large Dutch corporates with multiple locations in the Netherlands is explored. From this the most relevant priorities are selected to develop a realignment strategy for.
The selected priorities of these case studies are: ‘support culture’, ‘increase flexibility’, ‘increase productivity’, ‘increase sustainability’ and ‘increase technology’. As the need for a post pandemic flexible solution has been expressed extensively, flexibility is considered the starting point for this realignment strategy. From this perspective, three different integrated flexibility solutions are developed that reduce core space of the office portfolio. These are ‘working from anywhere’, ‘external co-working’ and ‘internal co-working.
Additionally, an assessment framework has been developed to define what combination of solutions contributes most to these selected priorities. Furthermore, the applicability of these solutions have been defined based on portfolio and company characteristics. At last, this strategy is applied on a case portfolio, thereby implementing the two solutions ‘working from anywhere’ and ‘internal co-working’. For this case is concluded that in the short term post pandemic, the amount of core office space will likely not be down- or upsized due to existing leases, but instead a repurposing towards collaboration space within existing offices is proposed. Thereby emphasizing the importance of proactive realignment even more.