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.
Seven years into a domestic recovery, the US economy remains sound although it encountered heavy weather in the first half of this year. “There is no doubt that slowing global demand did diminish trade and investment,” says Kevin Thorpe, Cushman & Wakefield’s global chief economist. “However, as the second half of the year unfolds, we expect those categories to pick up steam, supporting stronger corporate profits, inflation and real GDP growth.”
As building owners and tenants become more aware of the benefits of sustainability, many are opting to sign green leases, either during the leasing process or as an addendum to an existing lease. The goal is to help both parties save money by reducing operating costs and reach building efficiency goals. According to a 2015 study by the Institute for Market Transformation, green leases have the potential to save the U.S. office market $3.3 billion annually and cut energy consumption by up to 22% in leased buildings. Sounds pretty compelling.
When WeWork opened its Shanghai office in early July, it was nearly fully leased almost immediately.
So successful has its model been in cities around the world in recent years that Hony Capital and its parent Legend Holdings recently led a $780 million capital raising for WeWork, signalling their intention to help the company expand its hip-office operations across China.
But WeWork is not the only big name player vying for opportunities in the co-working space arena in China. Its success has caught the attention of developers in China keen to emulate its success by turning excess office supply into coworking space.
‘Caution’ appears to be the key word among corporate occupiers at the moment in leading global markets including New York, London, Singapore and Beijing. While corporate performance is healthy in most industries, all firms remain under pressure to maximise the efficiency of their real estate portfolios. The financial services sector continues to be focused on consolidation and rationalisation of its footprint, while the energy sector is still experiencing pressure from low oil prices, resulting in portfolio reviews and cost-reduction initiatives.
LOS ANGELES—The gap is closing between creative office and traditional office design, according to architect and designer Ware Malcomb. The firm has completed the Landing at 2040, a single-box creative office conversion project in El Segundo. The property has the amenity package of a creative build, but is designed to appeal to both traditional and creative users.
By the numbers, WeWork’s dominance as a collaborative-workspace provider is hard to dispute. With a $16 billion valuation as of March, and more than 900 employees as of June, the company currently leases coworking spaces to 60,000 members at 110 sites in 30 cities across 12 countries. (It also has two WeLive locations, a residential take on the sharing experience.) This includes the 13 sites in seven cities that WeWork opened since the beginning of this month alone, which translate to 9,500 additional desks, each of which can be rented per month.
Aside from bringing in revenue, these hundreds of sites and thousands of desks also serve as one enormous test bed for WeWork’s 13-person product-research team to conduct massive studies in architectural planning, programming, and design. Kicking off this endeavor was the debut of the company’s flagship “beta floor,” the sixth floor of WeWork’s Times Square office, in New York, which hosted the company’s inaugural product roundtable last week.
NEW YORK CITY—Although leasing volume in July was the lowest since October of last year, Cushman & Wakefield says the 1.5 million square feet leased last month still indicates Manhattan’s office market is in fine shape.
The brokerage firm in its Marketbeat Office Snapshot for July, reports the overall asking rent in Manhattan increased 4% year-over-year, setting a new record of $73.27-per-square-foot. Asking rents in 17 of the 19 Manhattan submarkets increased in July as compared to a year earlier.
WeWork, the world's largest coworking space founded in New York in 2010, now has a valuation of over $16 billion dollars. Their recent valuation is comparable to the market values of Vornado and Boston Properties.
With data from Falkon, RE:Tech recently ran a sample study on the benefits of coworking operators like WeWork and their impact property valuation.
The Chicago region’s office market seems poised to finish 2016 on a strong note. The overall vacancy rate has remained at 13.3% since the end of last year, but the CBD did record a slight uptick during the second quarter, and the suburban markets posted a 20 bps decrease year-over-year to 15.6%, according to stats just published by Avison Young.
Today’s office owners are distinguishing themselves through common-area amenities and expanded/upgraded outdoor areas, Voit Real Estate Services’ SVP Liz Hurley tells GlobeSt.com.
After a sluggish first quarter, the US office market saw a return to form in Q2, according to reports from Lee & Associates and Avison Young. The two firms reported declines in vacancy nationwide during Q2, increases in absorption and upward trends in asking rents.
Office markets including New York, Washington, DC, Chicago and Orange County, CA, all reported net gains in occupied space in Q2 after posting negative net absorption in Q1, states the Lee report. That track record helped bring net absorption nationwide to a “healthy” 37.5 million square feet, compared to just 15.2 million square feet during Q1.
CHICAGO—As reported earlier this week in GlobeSt.com, the Chicago office market has recently seen a lot of leasing activity and rising rental rates. About 2.8 million square feet was leased in the second quarter, according to Savills Studley new second quarter report, and 2.4 million square feet in the first. That brings the total for the four most recent quarters to 13.3 million square feet, far more than the long-term annual average of 8.9 million square feet.
But although other developments this year can’t exactly be termed storm clouds, they do show that the current picture is more complicated. The availability rate recently went up, for example, an increase that Savills Studley partly attributes to the new class A space underway in the West Loop and Fulton Market area. And amidst a bit of a slowdown among tech companies, the supply of sublease space has also started to rise.
A chock-full pipeline of office product is posing a larger threat to rent growth and asset values in London, than is the risk of companies leaving following the United Kingdom’s vote to depart the European Union. According to UBS Group AG, oversupply of office space was a problem long before Brexit. According to UBS’ Thomas Wels, the new buildings will come online in 2017 and 2018 “and isn’t priced into rents.”
The micro-market around LAX and Century Boulevard has the highest office vacancy rate in South Bay, at a whopping 40 percent, according to a new report by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.
“It’s always had a higher vacancy rate…the office product there is aged and a lot more dated,” said Mark Sokolowski, director of Global Corporate Services at NGKF. “There are passive ownerships used to collecting income and not putting money back (into buildings).”
As it currently stands, commercial real estate is a mobile industry without mobile tools. Brokers spend an average of 50% of their time away from their desk and in the field. This contradiction yields one of the biggest sources of frustration for today’s commercial broker.
From half-empty office blocks catering to an increasingly mobile workforce to car parking bays outside private homes, what’s there isn’t necessarily a waste of space, it’s a wasted opportunity to use the space in a more productive way.
Now, the sharing economy is looking to change that. Restaurants are the latest buildings looking to make more use of their space. In New York City, start-up Spacious is partnering with restaurants that are empty during the day to turn them into coworking spaces for freelancers, entrepreneurs and consultants looking for a different work environment.
Every office landlord wants the best and highest-paying tenants for their buildings. As Landlordology points out, the key to attracting such tenants is courting millennials, or the workers born between 1982 and 2004 “who practically entered the world with smartphones in their hands.”
Just look at the millennial-heavy TAMI (technology, advertising, media and information services) sector, which made up 72% of Manhattan’s new office leases in the first quarter of 2016, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
CBRE has set the record straight—most Millennials are not city-flocking suburbia haters. In a recent study, the firm dispels the myth that American suburbs are dying, saying that statement is grossly exaggerated. Recent census data shows 30% percent of Millennials live within urban areas—and the remaining 70% are in no rush to move downtown. According to US Census data, the nation is less urban than it was in 2000.
New York has surpassed London as the world’s expensive city in which to employ workers, despite recent indications that office and residential rent growth is slowing, according to a new study by international brokerage firm Savills.
Savills analysts attributed the shift in part to the impact of a dip in the value of the British pound following the EU Brexit referendum, which has reduced tenant costs by approximately 11 percent in the British capital since the start of the year.
The corporate real estate profession will be influenced, disrupted and transformed in the years ahead by a powerful combination of forces that are re-shaping business strategy and operations, consumer preferences, and how and where people want to live and work, according to a new report from CoreNet Global. The Bigger Picture: The Future of Corporate Real Estate draws on the expertise of more than 30 thought leaders to provide insights from multiple perspectives beyond CRE: technology and the internet of things; risk mitigation; cyber security; environment, energy and sustainability; corporate social responsibility; the global economy; people, talent, wellbeing; and the future of cities. The report argues that CRE must deliver greater value in this dynamic business environment and a world that is changing rapidly, is more interconnected than ever before, is constantly disrupted by technological innovation, and is replete with both risks and opportunities.
