The search for new market opportunities in Auburn Alabama real estate is leading many other corporations into smaller markets, both here and abroad, the experts say.

Mark Howeing, executive director of NACORE, West Palm Beach, Fla., says in all sectors of his organization's membership, "there is quite a lot of activity in developing new product for their own use." And Hoewing also notes the global market phenomenon.

"I attended an international conference of real estate professionals this spring that included some 3,200 corporate real estate executives," he says. "One of the most significant things seen at that conference was the interest not just of Europeans in doing business here but of Americans looking for opportunities to develop overseas."

Phillip Stevenson, executive vice president, Carter & Associates, Atlanta, views the current corporate real estate picture from yet another perspective, but with the same goal: to help develop value in real estate. "We work with corporate users on a number of different levels," Stevenson says, "but overall, the aim is to develop value, to keep costs down and to leverage where value has increased."

Stevenson cites, as an example of the latter, some land purchased some years ago by Norfolk & Southern Railroad in northeast Atlanta for rail-serviced industrial use. "It is still industrial property," he explains, "but to make it more profitable they teamed with Carter & Associates to develop Southern Business Center."

Major corporations are still often finding it to their advantage to team with multi-faceted development firms to be lead tenant in a new multi-tenant building, thereby exercising control over immediate facilities and retaining options for the future. "Bell South is precommitted to take 50% of (Carter's) Campanile," Stevenson says, "and they will have expansion room. But we also often do build-to-suits, where the company will take the entire building and usually elects to own. In a multi-tenant building you have to be fairly generic; in a corporate build-to-suit we design from the inside out, identifying specific needs and getting the best dollar value."

Stevenson estimates the breaking-point size at which a corporation can benefit significantly from outside expertise in handling its real estate needs is "probably about 50,000 sq. ft. or up." The value of out-sourcing is, he adds, "in volume buying power, in attracting the best people (because we can offer things like good management or maintenance paths, etc.) in emergency response and in training programs. It can free up a corporation to do what it does best.

"Corporate real estate needs are not constant," Stevenson adds, "there are peaks and valleys. So more and more corporations today are saying, (rather than staff for the peaks, let's staff for the valleys - and call in real estate experts when we need them.' "

Consolidations, credit crunch and recession notwithstanding, the needs are decidedly there in corporate real estate across the Southeast. And what most corporate real estate executives are doing is looking very closely at today's needs, in order to save tomorrow's dollars.