Martha A. O'Mara

Martha O'Mara, is a leading authority on the integration of corporate real estate planning with business strategic planning. Her book, Strategy and Place: Managing Corporate Real Estate and Facilities for Competitive Advantage was published in 1999 by The Free Press and is the definitive source for aligning business strategic objectives with long term corporate real estate portfolio planning. She is a co-founder and Managing Director of Corporate Portfolio Analytics, which applies portfolio planning processes, real estate market intelligence, and forecasting tools to corporate portfolios. Corporate Portfolio Analytics clients include some of the largest corporate portfolios in the US including AT&T, GE, Sprint, the US General Services Administration, as well as numerous financial, professional services, and technology companies. Through the Place Strategy Partnership, whose members are large corporate real estate occupiers, Martha and her colleagues are advancing the practice of long-term corporate real estate strategic planning through research, education and quantitative modeling. Most Place Strategy Partnership members are Fortune 100 sized companies, with US portfolios ranging from under four million to more than seventy million square feet. Excluding the federal government portfolio, her firm currently influences occupancy decisions for more than 500 million square feet of commercial office occupancy just in the United States. Corporate Portfolio Analytics was awarded the prestigious H. Bruce Russell Global Innovators Award in 2006 by the preeminent professional association for corporate real estate, CoreNet Global, for their work developing market intelligence applications for corporate portfolios. As a Lecturer in Executive Education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 2000- 2004, Dr. O’Mara helped develop the school’s innovative senior management development programs for the real estate industry. She continues to teach real estate executives at Harvard and is a member of the Alumni Advisory Board for the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard University. From 1989 to 1998 she was an Assistant Professor at Harvard in the Urban Planning and Design department of the Graduate School Design and taught real estate finance and development, location strategy, doctoral research methods and design studios on urban development. Martha has also consulted to or developed executive education programs for a number of organizations including Bank of America, Fidelity, Hines, Equity Office Properties, Bentall Capital, Grubb & Ellis, and the GSA among others. She has published in the Journal of Applied Real Property Analysis, the Journal of Real Estate Research and The Journal of Corporate Real Estate. She has served as a judge for the Global Innovators Award multiple times. In 2000, she developed the invitation-only Executive Women in Corporate Real Estate Leadership Retreat, which holds annual meetings. In 2004, she was elected a Counselor of Real Estate, the industry’ highest professional designation. Martha O’Mara holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior jointly awarded by the Harvard Business School and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She also has a MA in Sociology and an MBA from Harvard. Her BA in Social Ecology is from the University of California, Irvine. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her three children.