Distinctions
Facility Management and Corporate Real Estate
Where is the boundary between operation and portfolio?
Concerns the use and operation of the built environment that already exists.
Concerns the portfolio: retaining, leasing, buying, disposing and redeveloping.
The difference in one sentence
CRE decides what you have; FM runs what you have.
Why they get conflated
In many organisations both sit with the same manager and the asset boundary is never made explicit.
Why it matters
Without an explicit boundary, replacement investment falls between budgets: operations carry the failure, the portfolio carries the replacement, and nobody decides.
How to tell them apart
Point at one component, say an air handling unit, and ask who pays for replacement and who decides when.
Back to distinctionsLast reviewed: 2026-08-23