Real Estate and Facility Management: You Need to Know

Real estate and facility management are important for making sure the places we live and work in are safe, comfortable, and well-maintained. From managing repairs to keeping buildings clean and efficient, these roles make a big difference in our everyday lives. But what exactly do these managers do? How do they balance keeping costs low, maintaining comfort, and being environmentally friendly? Understanding their roles helps us see how they keep everything running smoothly.

What is facilities management?

Facilities management helps ensure the functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of buildings and grounds, infrastructure, and real estate. Facility management is a management discipline that focuses on ensuring the functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of buildings, infrastructure, and real estate. It involves coordinating the demand and supply of facilities and services related to real property and buildings. 

It integrates people, place, process, and technology to optimize the built environment and improve productivity and quality of life for individuals and organizations. Key points of facility management include supporting people, encompassing multiple disciplines, ensuring functionality, comfort, safety, and sustainability, managing resources, budgets, and costs related to facility operations, and focusing on improving the productivity and quality of life within the organization.

Facilities management includes:

• Lease management, including lease administration and accounting
• Capital project planning and management 
• Maintenance and operations
• Energy management
• Occupancy and space management 
• Employee and occupant experience 
• Emergency management and business continuity
• Real estate management

Types of facilities management: There are two basic areas: Hard facilities management (Hard FM) and soft facilities management (Soft FM). 

• Hard FM deals with physical assets such as plumbing, wiring, elevators, and heating and cooling.
• Soft FM focuses on tasks performed by people such as custodial services, lease accounting, catering, security, and groundskeeping.

How Important is real estate and facility management?

Facility management is a vital aspect of real estate management, ensuring the functionality, comfort, safety, and efficiency of buildings and infrastructure. It plays a crucial role in optimizing facilities, managing costs, strategic planning, ensuring safety and compliance, and enhancing the user experience. By effectively managing budgets, facility managers contribute to cost savings and financial efficiency for organizations. Strategic planning involves long-term asset management, considering factors such as total cost of ownership, space utilization, and facility needs.

This also ensures safety and compliance with regulations and standards, ensuring the well-being of occupants and avoiding legal and financial risks. Furthermore, FM focuses on creating a comfortable and productive environment for occupants, contributing to employee satisfaction, well-being, and productivity, ultimately positively impacting the organization’s success.

Overall, facility management is a vital aspect of real estate management, ensuring the smooth functioning and efficiency of buildings and infrastructure.

What are the Benefits of Facility Management?

Facility management offers numerous benefits to organizations, including increased efficiency, cost savings, compliance with health and safety regulations, improved asset management, enhanced user experience, and centralized management. By streamlining processes, optimizing resource allocation, and implementing effective maintenance strategies, facility managers can enhance productivity and reduce downtime. By consolidating facility management services under a single provider, organizations can benefit from economies of scale, reduce administrative costs, and streamline operations.

Facility managers ensure that facilities adhere to health and safety regulations by staying updated on industry regulations and implementing necessary measures to minimize workplace risks. They also track and manage assets within a facility, ensuring inventory, maintenance schedules, and asset utilization.

Role of Facility Management Consultants

Facility Management Consultants or facility managers in real estate are instrumental in helping organizations achieve optimum performance levels and efficiency in managing their built environment. Facility managers have expertise in various aspects, thus providing insightful information and strategic solutions to meet their clients’ specific requirements. Herein are some roles facilitated by Facility Managers in real estate:

1. Strategic Planning

Facility management Work in conjunction with clients and develop strategies that are in accordance with the company goals and objectives. It analyzes current operations, including waste reduction and performance improvement, and develops line-by-line plans that enhance the efficiency and competitiveness of the operation.

2. Optimizing Space Utilization

Facility management analysts track the office layout patterns and suggest arrangements to identify the office space, facilitate the workflow process, and adopt the changes. This includes space planning, reconfiguration, and studies regarding the utilization of real estate assets, to improve their worth.

3. Cost Management

In their role of maximizing operational efficiency, consultants achieve this through a detailed analysis of possible cost-saving opportunities, negotiations with service providers for lower fees, and implementation of a series of efficiency measures. They perform intense financial analysis and develop budgeting strategies to enable well-maintained facility services at an economical cost.

4. Performance Improvement

Consultants from facility management can carry out an audit, which involves examining the performance of management processes and systems, identifying areas with weaknesses, and applying the best practices that will increase productivity, reliability, and service quality.

5. Risk Mitigation and Compliance

Consultants would be sourced out to guide adherence to regulatory compliance, health and safety parameters, and risk management measures that will guarantee facilities abide by the set requirements and minimize the risk of operation. They create the framework of emergency readiness, environmental sustainability, and risk prevention programs altogether.

What is the importance of facilities management?

For people to do their best work and feel engaged in their environments, they need to be in buildings that are safe, welcoming, and efficient. Real estate and facility management has a hand in everything that surrounds the people in facilities and on the grounds. Where they work, play, learn, and live should be comfortable, productive, and sustainable.

Superior facilities management will contribute to your organization’s bottom line, impacting the short- and long-term value of property, buildings, and equipment. Your efforts can be crucial to:

• Space optimization
• Guiding capital projects
• Energy management and maintenance
• Lease accounting
• Workplace experience

Look inside facilities management.

People spend 87% of their time in buildings. See how to improve your operations to make their lives more comfortable and maximize efficiencies.

Numbers show the importance of facilities management

30% savings

Real estate is the second-highest cost for an organization and effective space management can result in cost savings of up to 30%.

80% over budget

The average capital project is 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, but adopting capital project management technology can lead to up to a 45% reduction in overall project costs.

43% difference in turnover

Companies that rank high in employee engagement have 59% less turnover, 17% more productivity, and 41% less absenteeism.

30–50% savings

A smart building with integrated systems can realize 30–50% savings in existing buildings that are otherwise inefficient.

Functions of Facilities Management

Across numerous industries and company sizes, facilities managers have a wide range of important day-to-day responsibilities. These managers need to both plan ahead and also be ready for various tasks within any given day. While the manager’s responsibilities often include:

• real estate management
• capital projects and planning
• occupancy and space management 
• lease administration and accounting
• workplace experience

There are also ways to improve the performance of each responsibility that will fill the manager’s schedule:

• deliver operational efficiencies
• create an environment conducive to productivity
• find and adopt technological solutions 
• guarantee regulatory compliance
• minimize risks to facilities and employees
• reduce energy consumption costs
• reduce the carbon footprint of the real estate portfolio

Facilities management technology

The technology in facilities management includes both software and systems. Vast amounts of data are generated by built environments through the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, wifi, meters, gauges, and smart devices.

The most effective solutions enable facilities management departments to make good use of this data by infusing analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into an integrated workplace management system (IWMS). These technologies deliver cognitive capabilities that make computer-aided facilities management possible—so you can analyze and learn from data, enabling you to achieve real-time visibility, perform predictive facilities maintenance, and create more productive, cost-efficient environments.

Conclusion:

In summary, real estate and facility management are about more than just buildings – they’re about creating spaces where people feel at home and work effectively. As people want better, greener, and more comfortable spaces, the job of facility managers keeps changing. Are we ready to handle these new challenges as technology grows and people care more about the environment? By staying focused on improvements, we can make sure our spaces stay valuable and useful for years to come.

References:

https://eimproperties.com/what-is-facility-management-real-estate/
https://www.gradar.com/en/features/job-architecture-and-ai-job-descriptions/job-families/real-estate-facility-management
https://prmyazilim.com/en/solutions/facilities-and-real-estate-management