Corporate real estate asset management in New Zealand (preliminary analysis of performance and stage of development)

Abstract

To date the only substantial research into corporate real estate asset management in New Zealand has been that of Wei Kium Teoh, completed in 1992. This examined corporate real estate organisational structure, information systems and CEO attitude towards corporate real estate, amongst those companies listed on the New Zealand stock exchange. A summary of this research was published in the Journal of Real Estate Research, Fall 1993 edition. Lincoln University is now engaged in a substantial follow up study that both updates and extends the work of Teoh. The extension includes coverage of a far wider range of organisations, consideration of the attitudes to corporate real estate of persons other than the CEO, examination of the level of performance and stage of development of corporate real estate asset management (CREAM) and the influence of major organisational restructuring on CREAM performance and development. The research involves both a series of unstructured qualitative interviews with a range of corporate real estate executives plus a mail survey of approximately 500 organisations representing a wide cross section of users of real estate assets. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of the unstructured qualitative interview stage of the research. In particular it focuses on the level of corporate real estate performance exhibited by the respondents in terms of measures developed by Veale (1989), Pittman and Parker (1989) and Avis, Gibson and Watt (1989) as well as the stage of development in terms of the model developed by the CRE 2000 research team at MIT (Joroff, Louargand, Lambert and Becker (1993)).