Editorial

I am taking this opportunity to introduce myself as the new Co-editor of the Journal with Rianne Appel-Meulenbroek. I am currently an Associate Professor in property and management at the University of Melbourne in Australia. I have been involved in corporate real estate (CRE) research and teaching since 1999 but had an earlier career designing CRE – many schools, municipal facilities, health and aged care facilities and commercial real estate. Since commencing my academic career, I have been involved in writing over 70 conference and journal papers.

Australia is, I think, a productive place to study CRE. It has an active CRE practitioner community doing things that are interesting to observe and study, though the CRE academic community is small. It is distant from American and European centres of research which though occasionally lending a sense of isolation does provide a benefit in that it offers perspective on both and opportunities for synthesis based on not being closely embedded in either. Another advantage is the perspective from proximity to Asia which is rapidly developing both its CRE and CREM practice.

In taking this role as a Co-editor, there are a number of thoughts about how I can be useful in that role. The following is not exhaustive but a selection to initiate our conversation.

The first thought is almost oxymoronic in its obviousness for a journal editor and that is to support and encourage the development of CRE research and practice around the world.

The second is to continue the journal’s development as both a niche-specific speaking to users and occupiers of space, and speaking to wider audiences in business and real estate. For those in the real estate domain, the CRE perspective provides an important alternative view and to a certain extent a counter-balance to what I see as a dominant real estate paradigm of wealth and finance-related aspects. I argue that the CRE perspective helps others in real estate understand the sources of wealth that is founded in the demand for useful real estate for which economic rents can be achieved. Without demand, economic rents diminish with consequential wealth effects. I am not the first to note this, but I do somewhat emphasise the point as an antidote to real estate’s dominant presumptions of real estate’s purpose.

Another related audience is those in construction wanting to understand their clients and users. Organisations with CRE are very often those clients and users. Again, a journal focussed on users and occupiers can be a source of intelligence for suppliers of space and services wanting to know a bit more about their sources of demand.

A third thought which is quite a bit more philosophical, but that is in my nature, and that is to ponder the nature of reality and knowledge in CRE. I have observed and been intrigued about the relationship between theory and practice, though I do note that could be just so much navel gazing and wanting to justify my existence as a CRE academic. Having said that, the field is an emerging one with a maturing body of knowledge (this is after all the journal’s volume 19). It might be a stretch to call the body of knowledge mature, but there is now a body of CRE-related work that might warrant some reflection on it as a body of theory and how we have gone about producing it. I hope to return to such contemplations occasionally in future editorials.

In this issue, we have a diverse range of topics presented. Petrulaitiene et al. examine how mobility taking workers outside the building creates challenges in knowledge creation and for the service providers that support such work. The paper identified providers grouped by their services and their relationship to physical, virtual and social spaces. Providers integrating these services to support mobile working also originated outside the traditional real service sector. De Paoli takes us into the world of designed creative workspaces that increasingly feature in not just the real estate and design literature but are now also part of Web-based corporate promotion. Analysing these Web images, she shows that they can fit within five themes denoting the visual appearance the objects they display. Four propositions are made to challenge and provide a more balanced view on how to consider creative workplaces. Boge addresses questions of value creation by different parties in making of real estate. He finds in the Norwegian context, and possibly generalisable elsewhere, that both owners and users preference short-term value in early decision-making over factors valuable for longer-term value over the life cycle, which, in the case of Norwegian commercial real estate, can be as much as 60 years. Morri et al.’s longitudinal study of 300 Italian manufacturing CRE shows that, as a whole, there is more that they could do in managing their ownership levels and occupancy costs. Increasing capital locked in illiquid assets affected performance at all times and particularly in the times of crises covered in the studied period.