Most maturity models do not answer the wrong question poorly. They simply answer the wrong question.
What does a professional CREM organization look like? Centrally managed, highly standardized, digital, data-driven, and as closely linked to Finance as possible? Should it bundle its services, consistently outsource operational tasks, and itself focus on strategy and steering?
Many organizational discussions in Corporate Real Estate Management begin this way or similarly. And surprisingly often, the outcome is already fixed before the actual analysis has begun. It is supposed to become more centralized, more uniform, more standardized, and more strategic. That sounds modern, can be presented well on a management slide, and immediately creates pressure to act.
But that does not make it automatically right.
Because the organizational form of another company is always the answer to its business model, portfolio, culture, history, and specific problems. Anyone who copies that solution does not automatically adopt the conditions under which it works.
The flawed thinking starts with the maturity ladder
Many maturity models mix two questions that should actually be kept strictly separate: How is CREM organized? And how well does CREM master its tasks?
Centralization, outsourcing, user autonomy, mandate, or hierarchical integration are design decisions. Data quality, demand planning, contract overview, operator responsibility, investment management, and reporting, on the other hand, are capabilities that an organization can master more or less well.
Anyone who combines both in a single scale turns an organizational decision into a quality judgment. Centralized is then automatically equated with mature, standardization with professionalism, and outsourcing with efficiency. This is exactly where the problem begins.
A decentralized CREM can be managed excellently, transparently, and effectively. At the same time, a highly centralized CREM can have weak data, unclear responsibilities, and limited implementation capability despite clear reporting lines. A clean organizational chart is not yet a good organization.
Configuration is not maturity.
Best Practice is convenient. Best Fit is more demanding.
Best Practice asks a simple question: How do the best do it?
Best Fit asks the more difficult question: What fits our company?
This question is less comfortable because it does not provide a ready-made answer. An international manufacturing group with critical sites, energy-intensive facilities, and extensive operator responsibility needs a different CREM logic than a digital service provider with a flexible office portfolio. A diversified group with very different business units may need strong local decision rights. A company with largely homogeneous sites, by contrast, can benefit from central standards and bundled steering.
Both can be right. And both can fail spectacularly.
What matters therefore is not whether an organization is centralized or decentralized. What matters is whether mandate, decision rights, roles, processes, data, competencies, and steering model fit together. It is not the individual measure that decides, but the internal consistency of the overall system.
This is not a new consulting idea
The academic basis of this idea lies in contingency and configuration theory. Organizational research has questioned for decades whether there is one structure that is equally suitable for all companies.
Lex Donaldson systematized this idea: organizations function well when their structure fits strategy, size, technology, environment, and task uncertainty. If the context changes without the organization changing with it, a misfit arises.
This is highly relevant for CREM. Often, an organization is not fundamentally bad. It was simply built for a corporate reality that no longer exists today. The business has changed, and so has the portfolio. Sustainability, energy, digitalization, hybrid work, or operator responsibility have created new requirements. The organization, however, has largely remained the same.
Then it is not simply modernization that is needed. Then fit is needed again.
What Best Fit really means in CREM
Annette Kämpf-Dern and Andreas Pfnür have transferred this logic to Corporate Real Estate Management. Their statement is often shortened. It does not say that Best Practice is wrong or fundamentally worthless. Rather, it says that general professional principles can be useful, but that a universal overall CREM model does not exist.
That is a significant difference.
Of course, every professional CREM organization needs reliable data, clear roles, comprehensible operator obligations, transparency regarding costs and contracts, as well as the ability to manage internal and external services effectively. But this still does not mean that every organization must be structured in the same way.
The more precise formula is therefore:
Best Practice describes what CREM must master. Best Fit decides how CREM should be organized for that purpose.
Often, the problem is not in the organizational chart at all
In many companies, centralization is discussed for years. Yet the actual problem often lies somewhere entirely different.
The mandate is not clearly defined. Decision rights are unclear. Central and local responsibilities overlap. Data is stored in different systems. Service providers are administered, but not truly managed. Investments are allocated historically instead of being prioritized strategically.
Then the organizational chart is changed – and the problem remains.
That is exactly why an organizational analysis must not begin with a predefined target structure. It must first clarify which requirements arise from the business model and corporate strategy, what significance real estate has for the core business, where central steering is necessary, and where local decision-making speed is needed. It must also become clear which services must be mastered internally, which can reasonably be outsourced, and which capabilities are missing regardless of the later organizational model.
Only then does the question of what the organization should look like make sense.
Best Fit must not become an excuse
This must also be said clearly: “That is just what suits us” is not yet a strategy.
Best Fit must not become a shield for poor data, unclear responsibility, or lack of professionalism. There are requirements that are not open to negotiation. Legal and regulatory obligations must be fulfilled. Operator responsibility is not a matter of taste. Data and reporting capability cannot be argued away with corporate culture.
Fit therefore replaces neither competence nor obligation.
Best Fit is also not a free pass for the status quo. An organization must be able to explain why its chosen logic fits the company, which conditions it requires, and how it can be recognized that it actually works.
This is exactly where we apply AI-supported analysis
Within the framework of CREM Strategy Works, we have therefore not developed yet another classic maturity questionnaire that ultimately spits out a level from one to five and thereby creates a supposed clarity.
We are working on an AI-supported Analysis Scout that structures documents, condenses statements from interviews, makes contradictions visible, and brings together different perspectives. Not to automate the management decision, but to make the analysis more robust.
AI can help identify patterns, compare statements from different sources, and make gaps or inconsistencies visible at an early stage. But it should not pretend that in the end there is a mathematically unambiguous target organization. The decision on mandate, centralization, sourcing, and responsibility remains a management decision.
It should simply be made on a better basis.
This is exactly where we apply AI-supported analysis
Benchmarking remains useful. It shows how other companies work, which capabilities they build up, and which models are developing in the market. The mistake only begins where the benchmark becomes the target model.
Benchmarks answer the question: What are others doing?
Best Fit answers the more important question: What does our company need?
And perhaps that is precisely the decisive insight: there is no best CREM organization. There is only an organization that fits the company better or worse.
Not every CREM organization has to become more centralized. But every CREM organization must be able to explain why its chosen logic fits the business, the portfolio, and its own capabilities.
Anything else is not an organizational strategy.
It is a template.