Efficiently managing a vast number of real-estate assets requires reliable data

With more than 1.100 buildings, covering around 1.2 million m², and more than 600 plots of lands in its jurisdiction, Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur realized they needed a more efficient approach for managing their properties. This required a complete shift in their real-estate strategy toward a more sustainable one. They needed to upgrade and centralize their legacy systems and processes into a single database comprising the 16 different departments that were handling the city’s ownerships and the real-estate portfolio, which were scattered across 50 different databases.

Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur wanted to better identify their financing needs, assess their properties’ risks of obsolescence, and focus on investing in sustainable assets. This would allow the Nice region to adopt cost-efficient measures and find new revenue streams.

Additionally, the client wanted to find new ways of working, to support better communication and collaboration between its departments, spread across over 100 locations, and to optimize its administrative offices’ footprint.

Defining a real-estate master plan in six steps

BearingPoint used a six-step approach to support Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur in implementing a real-estate master plan. First, BearingPoint collected and consolidated the asset inventory from over 100 sources (documents, Excel databases, etc.), which involved more than 60 contributors. Data cleansing followed, resulting in a complete and accurate master database.

In the second step, the team held interviews to gather input from all real-estate directorates and departments, such as the number of administrative offices and where they are located, workplace conditions, and employee expectations from adopting new ways of working in relation to the nature of their jobs. The real-estate data was then examined using different analysis streams. These included financial aspects, such as: annual rent per square meter; technical details, like building conditions and accessibility; occupancy rates of proprieties; and regulatory compliance.

The next step converted the data into key performance indicators (KPI) for the real-estate assets. BearingPoint then defined a single real-estate policy, outlining the objectives, actions, and KPIs to follow for the next ten years.

The sixth step defined the real-estate strategy, asset by asset. This reflected the demands gathered in the second step, and provided indications to whether an asset should be sold, kept, or renovated, and the likely costs of any of these actions.

Gaining a holistic view of the patrimony inventory and shifting to sustainable real-estate assets

Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur now has an updated real-estate strategy, based on a master plan that enables them to optimize their real-estate portfolio management and investments in sustainable assets. They have an exhaustive inventory of their assets in the form of a complete database that helps the Nice region assess real-estate risks and take relevant actions concerning keeping, selling or renovating each property.

Additionally, new ways of working have been adopted by integrating the “hot desking” concept, switching from single-occupancy to shared-office desks in their real-estate strategy, based on recent trends toward increasing remote working schedules. This also resulted in optimizing the administrative offices’ footprint, therefore reducing maintenance costs.

Client

Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur is an intercommunal structure, around the city of Nice. It is located in the Alpes-Maritimes department, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, in the southeast of France.

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