Workplace tops agenda of businesses' top executives.

Workplace management and portfolio optimization are rated by senior-level corporate executives as the most important business practices for corporate real estate now and in the coming years, according to new research released by the CoreNet Global Applied Research Center during the Toronto Global Summit.

"One outcome of the survey was the high degree of consistency in the relative importance of these key issues," observed Dr. Bruce Ellis, Vice President of Global Research for CoreNet Global, who heads the new Applied Research Center.

Both areas are among the 10 topics examined by Corporate Real Estate 2010, CoreNet Global's industry research and leadership initiative on managing the global corporate enterprise in the digitally networked world.

"Portfolio optimization was rated as important or very important by 86% of respondents," according to Ellis. "Workplace was also highly ranked, with 84% of respondents rating the topic as important or very important."

The velocity of change and the resulting need for flexibility are the key drivers.

But underlying the expected reaffirmation of the drivers is the emergence of new models and approaches, including the concept of real options which combines the valuation of assets with a financially predictable way of developing a facility and later converting the way it's used without having to build again. The conversion of lab space to office space is one example as seen in a recent case study about British Petroleum.

New types of ownership structures to achieve corporate objectives are also on the immediate horizon, the survey indicates, as are the use of more flexible contract terms as seen in American Financial Realty Trust's (AFR) deals with Bank of America and Wachovia.