The always lively question-and-feedback exchange that is the IAMC "Get Some Help" session has taken place in a variety of venues, but its value is always unquestionable.

Leavened by the breezy delivery of moderator Jim Harbaugh, senior director, corporate real estate for Bristol-Myers Squibb, the perennially popular "Get Some Help" session at the IAMC Spring 2008 Professional Forum in Phoenix delivered equal measures of help, humor and guidance for the dozens of professionals in attendance.

Check out this edited and anonymously sourced account of that session to get an idea of what "Get Some Help" can bring to your knowledge base.

Jim Harbaugh moderating the Get Some Help program.

TOPIC No. 1: Workload

If your corporate real estate responsibilities include having to work from home or work across time zones with colleagues in Asia and Europe (i.e., 3 a.m. conference calls), is the company feeling your pain?

One corporation is institutionalizing the concept of "one simple thing," whereby supervisors ask each employee what one thing they could do to improve that person's life/work balance. "We don't have to do it, but let's talk about it," said one Get Some Help attendee. "You can come in at noon when there's a late flight, for example. My simple thing was that when I'm on vacation, I'm not taking the Blackberry."

Another mentioned taking every other Friday off, or following the lead of his boss by making sure to make up for a missed saxophone lesson caused by an unplanned meeting. "Allowing flexible planning — as long as you're not missing key meetings — works fine," he said.

Another corporate practitioner noted that while life/work balance may appear to be taken very seriously at human resources, there are still a lot of e-mails arriving in the middle of the night. The mandate may be there, but its goals are sometimes reached in ways that HR never intended, a kind of balance through resignation:

"I've gotten more used to just never being able to catch up," he said. "It's easier to let it go now, because I'm always behind."

Do corporate personnel give the same life/work consideration to their service providers?

"I don't expect any more from them than from my staff," said one. "I don't expect people to work 80 hours over the weekend. I will tell people to back off. It's all based on commitment. The how and the when, I don't care about, as long as it meets my time commitment."

"We're seeing younger people have this [as a priority]," chimed in another corporate real estate director. "To some degree, those people are going to be running the organization. I'm from the old school, and it's just a real learning experience."

Among the lessons, said that attendee: "Make sure you're working on the most important thing. The quick thing may not matter that much. You have to make sure you're working on the priority things, the top of the list."

"You often hear 'I'm really busy,' said another. "But are you getting anything done. Don't ever confuse efforts with results."

TOPIC No. 2: Who or what department is responsible for ensuring that real estate transactions are properly accounted for?

"The corporate controller's group," was one answer. "We share every deal with them, whether disposition or lease, and there is a formal electronic transfer of information."

"There is an electronic summary of the lease, with all pertinent details, to alert the accountants," said another.

But "accounting guys have a secret handshake," cracked another participant. "How do you interface with accounting so you know the secret handshake?"

"They would come to us," responded one of the questioner's peers. "The business is responsible for its own information, to make sure it gets recorded properly."

"My group also owns the budget," observed another. "We want to measure it right from the beginning. Finance groups, like others, have been outsourcing, so the experience level and business acumen among finance business partners is not nearly as strong as it used to be. And they also don't have time to work. So as a result they rely on us to give them the guidance. We enter it, and if it happens to be wrong, they'll fix it for us."

"We have just gone full circle," said a fellow practitioner. "Accounting no longer bothers real estate. I'm responsible for when I put it into my real estate system, which now uploads it into SAP for payment. So we're responsible for putting the accounting charges into the system. They have to tell me where they want it charged, so the actual payment gets booked."

"How they account for it, that's their problem," said another.

"If there is a lease where they need to be straight-lining it, I don't worry about it."

"We're more strategically involved than we used to be," said another, noting the need to be more in tune with the c-suite because of upcoming changes in accounting standards regarding operating leases, which could result in 25 percent more operating expense, he noted. "You really need to get dialed in with these guys," he said. "It will become increasingly more important in the coming years."

"We got involved in making an interpretation on FAS 13, to decide how to account for something in the next few years," noted another Get Some Help participant. "Part of it was that we had financial experience. They make the final determination, but we're the center of excellence, and they want our opinion. We can facilitate getting it to the accounting people, which is really over in India now. You don't have to become an accountant, but if you're in the real estate group, you should understand it."

One way to understand is to visit with internal and external auditors.

"I feared those situations, but to get the information, these are the people who do know the rules," said one practitioner. "It worked out pretty well. Plus we got a lease administrator."

"Don't let accounting get in the way of making a financial decision that benefits the company," noted one final speaker. "It has to drive best net present value for the company."

TOPIC No. 3: Is the changing business climate forcing you to adjust strategy for disposals, or causing you to slow down on new capital spends?

"It seems like we're busier getting rid of stuff," was one general observation from the audience. But it may not be the down economy that's to blame.

"It's more internal than external," said another. "It doesn't matter if the real estate market's down — if they need to close it, then that happens. The value of the decision is so much greater than the value of the asset."

As for capital spends, "If it's the right business decision, we're going to go ahead and do it," said one corporate real estate leader. "I've been told by our treasurer that if we see something we want to buy and think it's a good deal, do it."

Several others in the room nodded in agreement, and only one admitted to having pulled a disposition property off the market because of the slowdown.

TOPIC No. 4: Attracting and retaining new corporate real estate talent

"If you don't hire, it's easy," cracked the first respondent.

But even if the talent is being built from inside, which brand of expertise is most valuable?

"In our work we do, for site searches, we're trying to bring in decentralized and make it centralized," answered one Phoenix attendee. "I started out thinking I wanted good technical skills in real estate. Now, after trying it, I think I want operations and finance skills, and I can teach them real estate."

"When I came in to real estate 15 years ago, one [manager] had the opinion he wanted real estate people, and the other manager wanted products people," said another. "The most successful result was with people with products experience, because they understand their businesses."

Sometimes the understanding takes an outside source, however, as it did with one company doing a lot of acquisitions in Canada: "We often joke about how much we paid a Canadian attorney to teach me real estate law in Canada," said the leader in question.

"We've outsourced almost everything we have, and are not hiring anybody to do that type of specialized work," chimed in one participant. "I'd be less apt to bring somebody on board from the company, because I don't have time to teach them," said another. "The learning curve is long either way," said a third.

"I disagree," said another participant, pointing to a colleague. "We brought him over from finance, and he caught on to real estate. I'm in the financial organization. If I bring them in, I'm going to have to move them. One reason I've gone with the financial people is that there are a lot of financial aspects to make sure you're driving the best result."

"If you have somebody internally, what typically happens is they're paired up with an outside service provider," observed another attendee. They have the same expertise, but neither of them knows how to get something done within the corporation."

"And how to deal internally," added another. "You can have great service providers, but they don't understand the culture."

"That's a problem we had," said one participant. "We had people brought in in the early '90s who never assimilated very well. They had no place, and were narrowly educated."

"I've worked in five other companies," cracked Harbaugh as he brought this topic to a close, "but I don't know if any of them would take me back."

TOPIC No. 5: What's your succession planning?

"Nobody has a lot anymore," stated one attendee. "We're going to hire it when we need it from the outside. And I don't think it's that hard to learn what you're doing and get assimilated."

"During my job search, people wanted somebody who would challenge the culture, not just know it."

"If you're not analyzing skills that are necessary, you're missing the boat. Get a halfway smart person who's somewhat motivated, and they'll figure it out."

But the overarching theme of the Phoenix Forum — M&A — was relevant here too:

"The culture changes immediately when you go through an acquisition," said one Get Some Helper. "Corporate culture may not be as important as we think it is."

TOPIC No. 6: Are you having trouble finding high-quality project management and construction people?

"We're having no trouble finding them," said one participant, but that's just where the troubles begin. "My challenge is ever-escalating cost, and issues always around schedule. We benchmark against each other all the time, so, lo and behold, we've backed ourselves into a pre-determined answer that everybody's falling into. Nobody is looking for ways to break that paradigm. I don't know what to do about it. The more we do projects, the more they seem to escalate in cost. I don't see anyone being creative anymore."

That said, he did highlight the efforts of one project management professional in Wisconsin, who "went through a critical path, picked out pieces and set a budget. It's not value engineering, but driven by critical path and key elements he thought were cost drivers."

"China is a challenge" for such talent, observed another attendee. "There is such saturation, it's tapping out managerial talent. Even though the universities are trying to turn them out as quickly as possible, the sheer demand and volume of development work in China has that tapped out. Not so much for the international construction management firms — it's developing talent in China for China."

"So we're starting to load it up with more folks from home," was another participant's solution to the China question. But that nation is not alone in talent shortages.

"We're finding that [situation] in Latin America," said one participant. "We need people for a project team, but it's hard to get local labor, so we're bringing people in from Mexico and other areas."

TOPIC No. 7: There are changes in our company that have resulted in a lot of specialized facilities. How do you value them? What is best way to go about it?

"Unless you're in a market where three or four users are going to come in looking for that, you're going to have to be realistic," was one initial observation.

"We write it as expected value, many times via appraisal," said another attendee. "And in a few instances, a market analysis by a good broker would give me a good range. I've done that with three market analyses, because we're probably going to use one of those guys to list it.

"We would have to have a formal appraisal, but we also have broker valuation," said another. "Frankly, today they tend to be over-valued. Doing a higher and better use analysis, the combination gets you to the best value."

A question you have to ask is 'What do you want to learn from that appraisal?' said one service provider in the group. "You might want to have the whole story of that property. Tell the appraiser what you want to achieve."

"Our requirement is [if it's a deal involving] $1 million or more, you have to have one on the shelf," said one attendee of appraisals. But others are far more skeptical.

"The appraisal is a good source of information, but reuse is far more important than appraisal," said another, adding that implicit to some appraisers' statements is the suggestion that "the appraisal can go right or left, and therefore the appraisal might be flexible too."

'A broker opinion is far and away more accurate," said another.

Get Some Help attendees take in the program

TOPIC No. 7.5: From the community standpoint, when there is a specialized building, how do you price these things? Do you put prices on them?

"Who are you marketing to, given that so many are disposing of surplus assets?" was one respondent's take with a question of his own.

"We turn it into warehouse," said an economic development attendee. "Look for a smaller operator, moving up. There are not a lot of sales to other corporations, which presents its own challenges with negotiations."

"We are seeing that," agreed another. "It's almost always the small local companies. The companies in the same big business don't need the facilities. You have to be ready to shut it and gut it."

"Investors and developers are the most interested," said another Get Some Help participant. "Never underestimate the value of offering a lease."

"There is an incredible increase of sale-leaseback activity," said one final observer.

Topic No. 8: How many companies have issues with book value that's way too high? How receptive do you find your CFO to a planned write-down of facilities that are functionally obsolete?

"On assets I've been involved with and which have been targeted to dispose of, we'd just accelerate depreciation," weighed in one participant. "They also wanted to minimize the hit, and get it down to something to match the market. If it took longer to sell it, it would actually be a gain."

"In corporate accounting, they want to know what we've learned since the last call," said another. "Our company is not afraid to write this stuff down. Look at your facilities all the time and put together a phase-out plan. Work with accounting or finance. As long as you're strategic and have a list, you can take a stab and get things more manageable."

"You can also find assets with market value way bigger than book value," noted one final speaker. "Bring them up and say, 'There's an opportunity here.'"