There's a new way to go about site selection
CBRE Intelligent Site Selection

Logistics & Supply Chain
Logistics & Supply Chain
CBRE has the largest, most experienced supply chain team in commercial real estate. We partner with our clients to solve challenges such as inbound transportation costs, outbound transportation costs, inventory carrying costs, reverse logistics costs, meeting desired services levels and estimating the necessary capital expenditures for facility investments including tenant up-fits, material handling equipment, automation and more.
We offer:
- Supply Chain Strategy
- Network design
- Insource vs. outsource & 3PL selection
- Facility design
- Operation capacity and assessments
- Business case development

Labor Analytics
Labor Analytics
Access to and cost of labor is a critical component of any site selection in today’s high-growth industrial markets. Our Labor Analytics team has been specializing in site selection and location analytics for 25 years and maintains unprecedented intelligence, award-winning technologies and analytics to ensure your ultimate location builds a competitive advantage. Our labor team tracks market activity and market competition daily, in addition to fundamental labor dynamics, to ensure you make a safe and prosperous human resources decision.
We know what you're up against:
- Unemployment rates nearing 50 year low
- Shift to e-commerce creating huge demand for warehouse workers
- Job hopping and high quit rate
- Warehouses concentrating in geographic areas, intensifying competition
- High seasonal labor demand intensifies hiring further
We offer:
- Demographic analysis, benchmarking and market optimization modeling
- Interviews of local competitors, like-kind employers and staffing firms
- Competitor survey and wage analysis
- Workforce longevity and maximum operation scalability models
- GIS analyses
- Executive-level detailed reporting and analysis
- Market scalability for expansion and/or growth analysis

Location Incentives
Location Incentives
The Location Incentives team will define the potential value of the economic incentives that may be feasible for sites under consideration, helping clients make the most informed site selection decision possible.
Our dedicated team members are committed to staying up-to-date on economic development policies that often change annually at the federal state and local level. In addition, we use the size and scale of CBRE’s platform to negotiate with federal, state, and local economic development organizations to create as much negotiating leverage as possible to maximize the benefits.
Companies frequently fail to claim the full value of a negotiated incentives package due to missed filing deadlines or inaccurate paperwork. CBRE’s proprietary compliance software removes the guesswork and confusion that can threaten these agreements by providing clients with the monitoring, organization and insights required to capture optimal value with reduced effort.
We offer:
Estimates of potential incentives across any U.S. state and city, including:
- Refundable corporate income tax credit
- Non-refundable corporate income tax credit
- Job training grant
- Payroll rebate
- State cash grant
- Local cash grant
- Sales tax refund
- Real estate tax abatement
- Personal property tax abatement

Facility Engineering
Facility Engineering
As your strategy begins to materialize, more confidence and accuracy in the size and head count are necessary. A facility concept design can help clients analyze volume profiles to understand the daily orders, lines, units and SKUs over time, along with an analysis of the cubic inventory requirements, which both contribute to the requirement for different automation processes and alternative equipment types. This concept design gives our experts a preview of the best material handling solution and provides a projected ROI before creating a final layout of the building.
We offer:
- Conceptual space plan options
- Client directed SF
- Size and (test) fit static analysis
- Optimized space plan analysis
- Prioritized building interface criteria
- Site selection test fit

Project Management
Project Management
Our Project Management experts initiate each project with a programming phase to define the project scope, budget and schedule. We ask meaningful questions and listen closely to our client’s vision for the future and then work toward a building that fits the business strategy.
Our project managers work hand in hand with our transaction managers throughout the site selection process, providing technical requirements to define the site, shell and tenant improvements during the RFP process to ultimately reduce occupancy cost.
Each land site and facility has a different starting condition, with a different level of effort and cost to accomplish the desired occupancy condition. Our experts evaluate the short list responses to minimize your risks for scope gaps, change orders, schedule delays and, conversely, value engineering and pricing leverage to reduce the proposal costs.
We offer:
- Construction management (ground-up, build-to-suit, renovation/reinvestment)
- Sustainability consulting
- Critical environments
- Tenant and infrastructure improvements
- Relocation management
- Programs: ADA, branding, survey
- Cost segregation
- Program management
- Design and FF&E management
- Cost consultancy

Location Intelligence
Location Intelligence
To thrive in this environment, real estate decisions must be grounded in data and driven by analytics instead of instinct. Our Location Intelligence team developed Dimension, a propriety tool, to bring the location story to life. Dimension helps clients visualize the impact of potential real estate decisions by combining exclusive data, market knowledge, client requirements and multi-media content with highly-visual, leading-edge mapping technologies, giving you the insight necessary to confidently make faster, more educated decisions. This tool also enhances real time, team-based collaboration.
We offer:
- Custom, interactive maps
- Virtual site and property tours and 3D market overviews with the latest data sets
- Mapped demographics, retail spending, segmentation, employment data and competitive landscapes

Transaction Management
Transaction Management
A key element in a final location decision is developing, negotiating and closing on the best financing and capital structure for you and your project. Preferred options are significantly dependent on credit, term, cost of capital and treasury strategy.
The unrivaled breadth of CBRE’s platform allows clients to investigate and execute transactions in any market under any circumstances. Or experts are the strongest assembly of Industrial & Logistics professionals in the business. We complete an Industrial transaction every eight minutes, offering our clients exclusive insight into more than 15,000 annual contracts.
The combined force of our deep analysis and local brokerage experts provide a comprehensive assessment benchmarked against your unique criteria, delivering insight and hidden opportunities.
We offer:
- Site Selection
- The best industry market research
- Strategic planning
- Financial analysis
- Lease negotiation
- Competitive analysis

Decision Support Modeling
Decision Support Modeling
We understand that your decision is more than just real estate—it is significant business decision, and real estate is only one of the factors. CBRE provides comprehensive decision-making tools customized for our clients to make the best and most informed decisions. We create a detailed financial model for each location in consideration, layering in transportation costs, labor costs, incentives, capital costs and real estate costs. Our customized process will provide you with an in-depth comparison of all of the potential scenarios on the table, adding clarity and confidence to your decision.
We offer:
- Client tailored financial solutions
- Financial modeling
- Identification of accounting and tax issues
- Lease analysis and comparison
- Board-ready deliverables to show optimal locations that support the overall business strategy
- Evaluation of cost and conditions tradeoffs
Do you have all the intel you need to
make the best site selection?
Well managed and executed correctly, industrial real estate projects can transform a company’s market position. The opposite can provide catastrophic results, impacting everything from customer service and transportation costs to workforce availability, and, ultimately, your bottom line.
