Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
CHICAGO—In the past few years, the rise of the sharing economy has changed the way people work, and in response shared office providers have begun a remarkable expansion in many top markets. And although these providers now account for just 0.7% of the total US office space, they play a key role in the market, a role which will only grow in the future.
Architecture firm billings continued to improve in May, reaching the highest score in nearly a year. While billings have increased every month for the last four months, the May score of 53.1 indicates that even more firms are now experiencing improving conditions. Inquiries into new projects were also strong in May and the value of new design contracts continued to increase, although at a modestly slower pace than in April.
The U.S. office vacancy rate fell to 16.0 percent in the second quarter, the lowest in seven years, research firm Reis Inc said on Monday. The rate declined by 10 basis points from the first quarter and marked the eighth consecutive quarter of decrease in the national vacancy rate. Overall net absorption increased by 5.4 million square feet of office space in the second quarter, a significant decline from an increase of about 11.6 million square feet in the preceding quarter, Reis said.
Technology has turned the commercial real estate industry on its ear. Though many perceive it to be the harbinger of death—particularly where retail is concerned—no single change has had a greater impact on the use of and investment in commercial real estate than technology.
Construction spending in May was an estimated seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.14 trillion, 0.8% below the revised April estimate, according to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce.
From April to May, private construction spending declined 0.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $859.3 billion and public construction spending dropped 2.3% to a rate of $284.0 billion. Religious construction was hit hardest over the last month, with spending dropping more than 10 percent. Sewage and waste disposal, transportation, and educational sectors also experienced dips in spending.
Both CBD and suburban office acquisitions volumes in the U.S. remain below last year’s levels. The total acquisitions volume is off 17%. CBD is down 10%; suburban 23%. One of the most important office investment questions is whether the decline in investment volumes has led to a decline in office pricing. In a few weeks, CBRE will reveal the results of its H1 2016 cap rate survey which will go a long ways to provide “pricing discovery.” In the meantime, analysis of the year-to-date data from Real Capital Analytics provides some perspectives.
Tech markets are growing like crazy. And not just in Silicon Valley, either—tech-talent is exploding from Charlotte, NC, to Madison, WI. Millennials are driving much of this growth, and their preferences in workplace and community are leaving marks on commercial real estate nationwide.
Despite fears that Silicon Valley and the tech boom are slowing down, tech jobs have grown by over 27% in the US over the last five years, according to CBRE’s 2016 Scoring Tech Talent report. Among the largest markets, the San Francisco Bay Area experienced the highest growth at 61.5% with Baltimore just a fraction behind. The top small tech markets grew even quicker—Charlotte, NC, saw job explosion at over 74% while Nashville came in at just under 68%.
Despite quickly rising construction costs in recent years, San Francisco has seen an explosion of projects coming out of the ground. The 50 largest projects being built in San Francisco total $12 billion in construction costs alone.
The US office sector at midyear is poised for continued growth, Marcus & Millichap says in a new report. Thanks to ongoing expansion in a number of office-using employment sectors as well as a slower pace of new deliveries, the national vacancy rate is expected to keep ticking downward while rent growth is expected to average 3.9% for the year—and considerably more in tech hubs.
Co-working companies now take up close to 950,000 square feet of office space in Seattle and on the Eastside — the equivalent of the 44-story U.S. Bank Centre in downtown Seattle — and that number is expected to keep rising in a sign of the growing demand for flexible workspaces. According to information from real estate brokerage Colliers International, co-working spaces account for 648,000 square feet in Seattle and another 301,000 on the Eastside.
NEW YORK CITY—The growth of co-working space in New York City has been phenomenal, scoring a 767% increase in occupied square footage since 2009 and an 86% higher number of co-working locations during that time.
However, despite the heady numbers, co-working remains a small niche in the overall Manhattan office market, registering a 1.2% market share at the moment. Newmark Grubb Knight Frank has released a report entitled: “WeLease: The Growth of Shared Workspace and Its Impact on the New York City Market” that provides concrete data on the relatively new phenomenon of co-working and how it has changed the way people work and how companies grow here and across the country.
As the outlook for GDP growth slackens, the office sector will start feeling the pinch. That sums up a new forecast from the NAIOP Research Foundation, which anticipates a sharp drop in net absorption compared to 2015.
The UK market for flexible workspace has grown 11 percent in just the last 12 months. The main driver of the upsurge is inevitably London, which saw the biggest increase of flexible space at 16 percent and now represents a third of the whole UK market. According to the new research by The Instant Group, traditional occupier inquiries for London grew at a lower rate (nine percent), meaning the supply of flexible workspace in London has outstripped conventional office space by some margin over the last year; a trend the report suggests that seems set to continue into the future. Double digit growth for flexible workspace was also been seen across the UK’s regions, with suburban locations seeing some of the UK’s most aggressive growth in terms of workstation rates and inquiries, despite a 12.5 percent increase in supply, as occupiers have chosen cheaper locations with good transport links over the highly competitive market in central London.
Consistent with its focus on becoming a global leader in Corporate Real Estate (CRE) technology, JLL has entered into an agreement to acquire BRG, a recognized expert in workplace technology consulting, technology implementation, and space and move management services. The transaction is expected to close next month, subject to customary closing conditions.
Whereas the residential real estate market continues to recover gradually, the same cannot be said for the commercial real estate market, where prices rose much quicker, according to a study by Goldman Sachs.
Whatever the causes, there’s a glut of commercial real estate (CRE) space, and one of the longest economic expansions in history has failed to alleviate it.
What’s the most expensive office space in the U.S. today? The unused one, of course. The Building Owners and Managers Association’s 2015 Experience Exchange Report noted that the average cost of unused U.S. office space is $25 per square foot or more. In the New York metropolitan commercial real estate market, I’d put my money on the “or more” option.
Most of us think of modern buildings as inert structures – the shell for all the activity that goes on inside. Advances in science and technology, however, are creating new types of biological and metabolic materials which are essentially turning a growing number of buildings into living, breathing organisms.
You don’t need to be an expert to realize the office market is changing. With more Millennials in the workforce and the adoption of technologies that allow businesses to be mobile and grow in nontraditional ways, office needs and leasing standards are changing. Over the past couple of years, we've seen teams transition from long-term leases to subleasing and co-working in droves. Today, we're seeing another shift. Teams of all sizes are turning to a new form of space called office sharing with terms less binding than a common lease and more flexible than a sublease. Why the shift? First, businesses are finally putting their foot down when it comes to making risky bets on long-term leases; and second, many of them are battening the hatches and becoming more conservative in their commitments in fear of a looming tech bubble pop and the widespread death of the "unicorns."
Between the rise of e-commerce and the U.S. population's demographic shift to urban centers, the era of thriving big box retail is largely over. Along with evidence that U.S. retail is overstored, many merchants are left scratching their heads about what to do with excess space. Staples has one answer. The office supplies retailer recently announced that it would partner with office-space sharing startup Workbar to set up co-working spaces in three suburban Boston area stores.
