The CREM Complexity Curve

The hardest real estate portfolios aren't the biggest ones.


I most likely won’t become a CFO, but I’ve very much enjoyed learning from the Secret CFO since his early Twitter days. Recently, he made a point (link in comments) that maps almost perfectly onto my world: the real driver of CFO difficulty is what the business actually sells, not its size.

The same holds for corporate real estate, except the link is in the built environment. In finance, product complexity lives in reporting and financial implications. In real estate, the building is the operational backbone.

A SaaS company's real estate portfolio is office. A manufacturer's real estate portfolio is production, logistics, and R&D infrastructure on top. Same line item, but a completely different animal.

So the difficulty curve for CREM runs along two things:

How technically specialised the asset is, and
How mixed the portfolio is.

Offices can be complex, no doubt. But the complexity is mostly organisational: stakeholder alignment, workplace change, competing preferences.

Hard, human, solvable.

Move toward retail, logistics, manufacturing, and special asset classes like data centres, test tracks, or life science labs, and the complexity turns technical and business-critical.

Floor loads. Power and cooling. Permitting. Contamination risk. Capex horizons measured in decades. Fungibility and therefore exit options that shrink the more specialised you go. Get these wrong and it not only costs money, but impacts your core business.

That's why a mid-sized manufacturer with a mixed, specialised footprint can be a harder brief than a far larger single-asset-class corporate.


#corporaterealestate #crem #realestate