Real Property: Improving Management Processes Could Reduce Costs and Generate Additional Revenues

This report assesses the effectiveness of the company’s real property management processes. We identified several opportunities to strengthen the effectiveness of the company’s real property management processes. Specifically, the company could have avoided at least $23.2 million in unnecessary costs and could realize as much as $6.8 million in additional revenue if it had better data on its real property portfolio, used analytic tools such as business cases to make decisions about real property, and adopted a long-term facility plan. We recommended that the company finalize plans and develop a timeline for collecting quality data and, once completed, use the data to develop meaningful property metrics consistent with common practices in the private and public sectors. To do so, the company will need to develop a process for collecting current information on office assignments, hiring, departures, and relocations. We also recommended that the company require sponsoring departments to prepare business cases or similar analyses to make decisions about property leases. Finally, we recommended that the company develop a long-term facility plan to ensure that individual departments’ real property decisions are consistent with the company’s long-term strategic goals.