The impact of software company size and culture on commercial real estate location and design

This paper aims to investigate the relationship of software company culture and core values and project management methodologies on the demand for corporate real estate (CRE), impacting decisions regarding location, square footage, office design and amenities.

A researcher-administered survey was designed with the assistance of a purposive sample of brokers, architects and interior designers to elicit responses from the CRE officers in software companies at four stages of growth, from small, entrepreneurial startups to large, publicly traded software companies, located in the same metropolitan area of the USA. Quantitative responses are summarized with traditional statistics and data visualizations. Linguistic analysis, including sentiment analysis and keyword relevance, was performed on the unstructured, English text responses.

Differences exist in the office layouts, amenities and locations across the four software company size categories studied. Linguistic analysis of company descriptions of office design, culture and core values, and the relationship between the two, provide another way for brokers, investors and other stakeholders to understand company perspectives and communication idioms related to CRE needs. The research was unable to show any differences in any dependent variable based on software project management methodologies due to sampling limitations.

This study is limited by the sample size of the participating software companies based on access to company leadership. Results are not generalizable.

Architects, investors, brokers and lenders may find value in using this study’s approach to better understand the needs of software technology clients. Specifically, stakeholders may find value in examining the linkage from software company size, culture and core values to CRE office layout, amenities and location.

The qualitative findings suggest that software company culture and core values and company size influence the design of the CRE demanded by software companies. Multivariate data visualization was designed to communicate longitudinal CRE data. Linguistic analysis was used to extract the emotional content and relevance scores from company descriptions of office design, company culture and core values and the reported effect of culture and core values on office design. Findings may be beneficial for stakeholders involved in the design, location and future CRE investments, and they suggest the need for future research on a larger sample.