Five questions every portfolio review should answer in under an hour
If your quarterly review takes three weeks to prepare, the review is measuring the wrong thing. These five questions are the ones that actually move a portfolio.
Adam Sewall · CRO/COO
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I have sat in a lot of quarterly portfolio reviews. The good ones share a pattern: they spend almost no time establishing what is true and almost all of their time deciding what to do about it. The bad ones are the reverse – forty minutes of “is that number right?” and five minutes of decisions.
Here are the five questions I think every review should be able to answer in the first hour, with numbers nobody has to defend.
1. Where are we paying for space nobody uses?
Not average utilization – that hides everything. Floor by floor, which spaces have been below a threshold for two consecutive quarters, and what do they cost fully loaded?
2. Which lease events land in the next 18 months?
Expiries, break options, renewal notice deadlines. Each one is a decision with a date attached. Missing a notice window is the most expensive mistake a real estate team can make, and it is entirely preventable.
3. Where is demand heading, and does supply follow?
Headcount plans by team and location, mapped against the seats those teams actually have. The mismatch is the strategy.
4. What did we predict last quarter, and were we right?
This is the question most teams skip. If you forecast a floor would reach 60% after a return-to-office push and it reached 35%, that matters more than the 35% itself.
5. What is the one move that changes the most?
Every portfolio has one or two decisions that dominate the outcome – a headquarters renewal, a consolidation, a new market. The review should end on that decision, with the scenario modeled and the trade-offs explicit.
A portfolio review is not a status update. It is the one hour a quarter where the portfolio gets to change.
If answering these five takes your team weeks, the bottleneck is almost never analysis. It is that the underlying data lives in six places and agrees in none of them. Fixing that – with governed dashboards that pull from one connected model – is what turns the review from a reporting exercise into a decision.
