Spotlight Series

Real Estate Leader Spotlight Series: A conversation with David Music

April 17, 2025

David, thanks for joining us. What initially led you to Corporate Real Estate / Workplace?

Thanks so much for this opportunity! Like so many, I came to Corporate Real Estate a bit by accident. I started my career in Supply Chain and Logistics designing warehouses and doing construction management. That led to workplace project management which led to real estate and workplace consulting which eventually led to me working on the occupier side.

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It did not take long for me to realize how much fun this industry is and I can’t see myself doing anything else. I blinked my eyes and suddenly I’d been doing this for almost twenty years with never a dull moment.

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Tell us about your most recent role. What functions did you oversee? How large was the CRE team? Where did the department sit within the organization?

Most recently I was with WTW (formerly known as Willis Towers Watson), a global Insurance Broking and Consulting firm. The CRE team there had a wide scope covering global Leasing, Projects, Workplace, Technology, and Facilities in a single global team reporting to the COO (although it had been under Finance prior to that).

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My responsibility was twofold: first, designing and managing our various multi-year transformation programs (4 over the last 8 years) including how much we could save, what it would cost, and the upside/downside risks to different program scenarios; and second, implementing, managing, and supporting the real estate technology and data analytics deployed globally for conference room booking, sensors, collaboration, facilities ticketing, drawing management, and more.

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Tell us about your portfolio. What did it look like and how was it evolving?

The portfolio was fairly typical of a large global organization in that it was 95%+ leased in multi-tenanted buildings with a wide range of small to large offices. It was atypical in that we had deployed reservationless agile workplaces across most of the global footprint prior to the pandemic. We had even successfully removed legacy desk booking systems as we gained the business’ trust that they could use the workplace without needing to pre-book.

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Since 2016, the Real Estate team had been actively working to drive better workplaces for employees while bringing down costs. The goal was to implement workplaces designed around data showing how employees actually worked to improve the experience while reducing the footprint by enough to deliver a positive return for the business. By taking a proactive approach and proposing positive ROI investment programs for real estate, we were fortunate that we were never pushed to simply shove as many desks into the smallest space possible.

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By being strategic, financially agile, and employee focused we were able to reduce real estate’s annual budget every single year by significant amounts while supporting a growing employee population.

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Could you share a story of a project or initiative you spearheaded that had a major impact to how your team managed the portfolio?

My favorite initiative in the last few years was leading the Work Styles / Future of Work program with a cross-functional team of company experts spanning every area of the business reporting into our CAO and COO. It is unusual for this type of globally impacting program to be headed up by real estate. Through this multi-month program, we were able to design a program centered around flexibility with no global mandates while gaining senior leader and c-suite support.

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The program launched in 2022 and remains largely unchanged today thanks to the highly collaborative approach we took. It goes without saying that any hybrid work styles program has massive impacts on the real estate portfolio. The outcome of the program has guided the last 3 years of real estate transformation activity and planning.

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What was your real estate tech stack? Are there any favorite processes or tools you think would be interesting for others to learn from?

I managed a fairly robust tech stack built around selecting systems that were best-of-breed for what they did. We stayed away from traditional IWMS for the most part while pulling data together as needed. Our biggest investment was deploying occupancy sensors beginning in 2015 eventually covering sites in more than 25 countries and on every continent.

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The decision to go down the occupancy measurement path allowed us to get very precise on new projects to optimize how much space we actually needed while demonstrating to the business that we were making conservative data-driven decisions. Technology operations is always a balancing act of first getting good data, second figuring out what the data means and how to use it properly, and third teaching others what the data means and that you are using it properly to their advantage. The third step is always the hardest.

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One more recent process was around supporting the business’ desire for better in-office collaboration. The problem as we understood it was that one of the biggest pain points of employees was not knowing which days the people they wanted to work with would be in the office. Often, employees tried to solve for this through offline messaging, calendar invites, or calls but too often they would choose their day in the office and be disappointed to find key people weren’t there after all. We selected a tool to help employees asynchronously plan which days would be best for them in the office and began deploying it globally. The process was non-mandatory (a cornerstone of getting employee acceptance) with a goal of building grassroots support for the system as employees discovered how it could help them.

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What challenges do you see in the industry today? How do you think leaders need to evolve to address this?

CRE, Workplace, and Facilities are changing rapidly in many ways. The degree and rate of change we are experiencing is a challenge regardless of the size of your portfolio or your level of experience. In the face of change it can be easy to begin chasing answers and grasping for new approaches. However, I’ve found the best way to begin handling this level of change is to slow down and embrace planning as a team. Everyone handles change differently and if there is not a clearly defined target it can be easy for misunderstandings or misinterpretations to arise. By slowing down, you give everyone a chance to get onto the same page without making changes you will eventually have to walk back.

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It's especially important to stop and think things through because every decision can have significant trickle down effects. For example, downsizing an office footprint by 40% to meet current occupancy numbers means: 1) doing a lot of analysis to understand the risks associated with peak day or town hall levels of occupancy; 2) reevaluating desk to conference room to collaboration space ratios; 3) redefining the employee experience and services offered in the smaller space; 4) managing local leader fears about lack of space if more people return than planned; 5) etc. etc. etc. Downsizing by 40% may have a great business case on paper, but if the impacts of that downsize are not thought through the final delivered workplace may create more noise and dissatisfaction than the financial gain was worth.

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None of this is easy and no one has the five step process for creating real estate standards and strategies in this post-pandemic world. The big service providers are struggling with this just as much as the occupiers because the effects of this change are impacting lease terms, space occupied, service norms, client expectations and causing robust and innovative growth in the flexible real estate industry.

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What’s next for the industry? What are you most excited about?

Unfortunately, I expect what’s next is more of the same for another 2 or 3 years as the impacts of the pandemic (and companies’ reactions to new work realities) continue to settle out. More and more companies will standardize their new approaches to managing their portfolios and planning projects. At some point, we will reach a level of stability where the big global service providers can begin sharing the new standards that they are seeing to both occupiers and landlords. But the change will continue to put pressure on the commercial real estate market with many cities still dealing with volatile financial and leasing conditions.

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Technology is rapidly evolving in the Proptech, Facilities, and Workplace arenas with a huge push to find useful cases for AI to help companies reach that point of stability. The roadmaps of these technology companies continue to be highly adaptive as the requirements of their customers change based on continually fluctuating approaches to strategy. It will be a couple of years before standard approaches to workplace experience settle in. Ultimately, I see this leading to new workplace-oriented approaches to iWMS.

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These changes keep me excited. I have made a career out of helping real estate teams deal with change locally, regionally, or globally. I know how disconcerting it can be for a real estate manager to have what should be a straightforward lease expiration business case but have no idea whether the lease renewal, downsize, relocation, or 50% downsize option is going to be preferred by the business. In normal times, the choice is fairly obvious. Right now, depending on the company, it is possible for equal support for each path with no clear right answer. Helping companies know how to get that answer keeps me going.

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