A company that owns the buildings it works in has a real estate portfolio without the discipline that usually comes with one. There is no rent roll, because the tenant is the business itself. There is no market test, because nobody is offered the space. And the cost sits in overheads, split across facilities, finance and the business units, where no single person sees it whole. The question corporate real estate teams end up asking is therefore a fair one: is there software to evaluate and steer owner-occupied group property centrally? There is, but it has to solve a different problem from investor software, and it pays to be precise about which problem.
Why owner-occupied estate is hard to evaluate
An investor evaluates a building by the income it produces. An owner-occupier has no income to evaluate, so the building is judged, if at all, by whether anyone is complaining about it. That produces three blind spots.
The first is cost. Depreciation sits in one ledger, energy in another, maintenance in a third, and the internal charge to the business unit, if there is one, was set years ago and never revisited. The total occupancy cost of a site, the one number an investor would start with, has to be assembled by hand.
The second is condition. A site the company has used for twenty years carries a renovation backlog that nobody has priced, because pricing it would create a liability on somebody's budget. The backlog is real either way, and it surfaces at the worst moment, usually when the site is being considered for sale or expansion.
The third is structure. Group property is rarely held in one company. Sites sit in operating subsidiaries, in a property company, sometimes in a pension vehicle, and are let between them at intercompany rents that reflect history rather than value. Any central view has to cut across those legal entities, and most tools stop at the entity boundary.
What central evaluation actually means: five figures per site
Central evaluation is not a valuation report. It is a small set of figures held consistently for every site, updated as things change, and comparable across the whole estate.
- Total occupancy cost, and the same figure per square metre and per workplace, built from depreciation or rent, energy, maintenance, services and taxes. This is what makes an owned site comparable with a leased one.
- Utilisation: how much of the space is actually used, measured the same way everywhere, so that a half-empty owned site is visible as a cost rather than hidden as an asset.
- Condition and renovation backlog: the technical state of the building and the priced measures it needs, by year, so that the plan for renovations across many sites is a portfolio decision rather than a series of surprises.
- Book value against an indicative market value, because the gap between the two is where disposal and sale-and-lease-back decisions live.
- Lease versus own: for every site, what it would cost to lease equivalent space, so the ownership decision is a calculation and not a tradition.
None of these is hard to compute for one site. The value is in having all five for every site, in the same structure, at the same time.
What steering means: the decisions the figures feed
Steering owner-occupied estate comes down to a handful of recurring decisions, and each one needs specific data to be made well. Consolidating two sites into one needs utilisation and cost per workplace for both. Disposing of a site needs book value, market value and the backlog that a buyer will price in. A sale-and-lease-back needs the occupancy cost today against the rent that would follow. Investing in a site needs the renovation plan, its cost by year and the years the company intends to stay. Relocating needs all of the above plus the lease exposure on the alternative.
The software's job is to make each of these a report rather than a project. When the figures live on the site record, the consolidation case for two sites is a filter and a comparison. When they live in six spreadsheets held by four departments, it is a three-month workstream, which is why these decisions get made late or not at all.
Software categories, honestly compared
| Category | Examples | Strongest at | Where it strains for owner-occupiers |
|---|---|---|---|
| IWMS and CAFM | Planon, Archibus | Space, moves, maintenance dispatch, room booking | Deep and expensive; evaluation and disposal decisions are not the core |
| Corporate ERP real estate module | SAP RE-FX | Contracts and accounting inside an SAP landscape | Only sensible if SAP is already the group standard; little portfolio steering |
| Fixed-asset ledger plus BI | ERP asset register with Power BI on top | Book values and depreciation | Knows what a site cost, not what it costs, needs or is worth |
| Spreadsheets per department | Facilities, finance, business units | Nothing has to be bought | No single site record; every decision is a reconciliation exercise |
| Portfolio platform | REPM | One record per site across entities, cost, condition, CapEx, lease-vs-own | Not a CAFM; day-to-day facilities operation stays elsewhere |
The tool comparison for corporate teams goes through these categories in more depth. The short version: IWMS is the right answer when operating a large estate day to day is the problem. It is the wrong answer, or at least a very expensive one, when the problem is knowing what the estate costs and deciding what to do with it.
Group structures: one view across several companies
The practical test for any candidate system is a group with, say, eleven sites held in four legal entities, two of them let to a third entity at an internal rent. Can the system show all eleven sites as one estate, with total occupancy cost per site regardless of which company holds it and which company pays? Can it show the intercompany rent separately, so that the group view is not distorted by an internal transfer price? And can a user in one subsidiary be restricted to that subsidiary's sites while the central team sees everything?
Most systems built for a single owner fail this quietly. The site list is per company, the report is per company, and the group view is an export. That export is exactly the manual consolidation the central team was trying to get rid of.
Where REPM fits, and where it does not
REPM holds every site on one record, owned or leased, across every group company, with the five figures above carried on the record and rolled up across the estate. The corporate real estate setup adds occupier leases with their break and expiry dates, a CapEx plan per site by year and cost group, and ESG figures per building. Because it runs on Microsoft Dataverse inside the company's own tenant, the security model maps naturally onto the group structure: subsidiary users see their sites, the central team sees the estate, and finance can read the same records from Power BI.
The boundary is the one drawn on the persona page. REPM is not an IWMS or a CAFM. It does not plan desks, book rooms or dispatch a technician to a broken lift, and a company that needs those at scale should run them in a facilities system next to REPM. What REPM answers is the question above the facilities layer: what does each site cost, what state is it in, what will it need, and what should the group do with it.
A checklist for corporate teams
- Is there one record per site that survives the legal entity boundary, or a list per company?
- Can total occupancy cost be built per site from its actual components, and shown per square metre and per workplace?
- Does the site carry its condition and a priced, year-by-year renovation plan?
- Can book value and an indicative market value sit side by side on the same record?
- Is the lease-versus-own comparison a standard view, or a spreadsheet somebody built once?
- Can subsidiary users be restricted to their sites without a separate system per company?
- Who owns the record when facilities, finance and the business unit all touch it?
See your estate on one record
The fastest way to test this is to load three sites from two group companies into the free trial, enter their cost components and a rough renovation plan, and see whether the estate view answers the consolidation question without an export. Read how REPM works for corporate real estate teams, or start in the free trial.