Bank Occupier Property Strategy
19.04.2010

Brief

One of the largest Bulgarian-based banks retained Forton International to conduct an analysis and optimization strategy for their nationwide branch network. The negative impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the local banking sector spurred the need to improve the current network position with the aim of addressing sustainability issues, and keeping operational costs to a minimum. The bank sought Forton’s retail market expertise in improving the location strategy while still preserving the optimal territorial coverage. Importantly, the bank wanted the project to be concluded within 2 months.

Solution

Our team thoroughly inspected 89 client bank offices and visited over 600 branches of 7 competitive banks with the purpose of performing our analysis and comparison study. Forton created a scoring model by recording several location criteria and differentiating relatively small zones with similar characteristics for an estimate of the overall utility of each branch.

Forton managed to identify problematic issues such as surplus presence, overlapping catchment areas, non-compliant internal and external conditions, and many others. Ultimately our consultants proposed a number of relocation alternatives, a rent savings strategy and an evaluation of the true opportunity cost of relocation.

Conclusion

By pursuing an effective analysis approach and successfully summarizing the scoring matrix results, Forton was able to achieve a functional repositioning and optimization strategy for each property, and for the entire branch network.

Lessons Learnt

  • Effective use of property evaluation strategies adjusted to the present tasks for extracting maximum value for the client’s optimization intentions.
  • Coordination of several teams for running this project throughout various locations.
  • Successful cooperation with Address Real Estate Bulgaria in obtaining up-to-date information about the local submarket trends, rent levels, etc.

Keys To Success

  • Creation of a tailor-made benchmarking model for the analysis of a substantial amount of data.
  • Disciplined time management, pre-elaborated comparison models and meeting the expectations of all involved parties, resulting in a short execution period.