Each year Gensler puts out a very informative marketing and informational piece that I find fascinating. I copied a couple of the key pages from this year’s piece and they are below. Get your reading glasses out or just see my highlights.
They talk about Six Meta-Trends:
–Mobility and performance—I have spent a lot of time on the mobility issue in these narratives. Adding performance to the picture is key. Companies like Yahoo are bringing some employees back to the office. Mobility only works when there is performance.
–Health inside the workplace—lots of hi-tech companies are focused on this. Bringing health to multi-tenant office buildings, now that is a different story. Today, nobody is really focused on it. In fact, in the 90’s almost every new building had a small workout room with showers. However, these saw very little use by tenants. Maybe the time has come to rethink this issue.
–Integrating Tech with the office—everybody is working on this. Technology in the office is a topic for today and the foreseeable future.
–Urbanization—In the next month or two you will see the actual graphing of this trend. I am doing an email on urbanization with some comparison to Metro Phoenix. The bottom line is that the big urban centers will continue to grow and create issues within their cites and for markets like Phoenix as we continue to compete.
–Globalization—Since Thomas Friedman’s foundational work “The World is Flat,” globalization is something we are all acutely aware of. Grabbing a Coke in a Wati in the middle of the Sahara desert while I was running the Marathon Des Sable (Okay, a little bit of bragging here. Check out the toughest footrace in the world http://www.marathondessables.co.uk/) told me this was an amazing trend here to push us all into new markets.
–Urban development. Phoenix has been interesting. Over three billion in investment in our downtown and it remains an Monday through Friday environment. Housing is the answer. People must live, work and play there. We have the work and play. Need more housing but the cycles keep messing with that ingredient.
Below the Meta-Trends is the page on office development. Here are a couple key points:
–Parking—we continue to see greater need for parking.
–Floor plates—they suggest bigger and bigger. I think there is a need for that but not for every submarket.
–Higher ceilings—cost be damned. I agree.
Thanks for taking a look.
Craig
602.954.3762
ccoppola@leearizona.com
