The Future of Office Real Estate is Betting on a New Strategy
COVID-19 has changed life as we know it. From social distancing to remote working, to no longer being able to jump on a plane to the other side of the world at the drop of a hat, 2020 has been a year where everything we thought we knew or took for granted, has changed.
This also includes the future of office real estate.
In this article by Nate Berg, he discusses how crusaders of the real estate world, Michael Casolo and Steven Quick, are betting that the future of commercial real estate will not only be about selling office spaces but designing and building them, too.
Michael Casolo, who has worked at JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, and Bridgewater Associates, and Steven Quick, an executive at Cushman & Wakefield, have joined the global firm Unispace, a design-build firm that was founded in Australia in 2010. Since then, it has grown into design studios in 25 countries and 46 offices, with Quick becoming the new CEO and Casolo taking charge as its Chief Revenue Officer.
As Quick admits, while the current turbulence of the office business model during a global pandemic may not seem like a great time to join,
the timing might seem sort of counterintuitive...but I think we’re going to see a lot of companies looking for answers on what does the post-COVID workplace look like.
Casolo notes that executives are beginning to understand how important office spaces and designs are to the success of their companies, with the things that most influence the user’s end result is the design, strategy, and the overall execution of the design, ranging from how the furniture is set up, to construction, to space it’s in.
Unispace’s model incorporates strategy, design, and execution together under one roof, allowing for greater control over the end product. Originally, traditional commercial real estate would hire a consultant to construct a workplace strategy, then a broker to find the space, an architect to design the space, then, finally, a project manager who would line up a contractor to build it. Having it all under one roof allows for companies to spend less money while taking a whole lot less time to figure it out.
This is especially important in this time period, given that many companies are frantically trying to reconstruct their office spaces to models that meet health and government guidelines, at a reduced capacity. In fact, as Berg notes,
Unispace estimates that companies are going to be wanting 20% to 30% less office space when the pandemic is brought to heel…working with one organization to make these adaptations means companies can rethink their offices more quickly, and more easily implement changes as conditions evolve.
While many offices currently have big yellow crosses taped to the ground to show people where to safely stand, Casolo and Quick bet that long-term, companies will transition to smaller spaces with a different design, in order to accommodate both the reduced capacity and safety measures.
Even in these last 10 days, we’re starting to see clients clearly making decisions around that third phase of what’s the workplace like post-COVID...we believe, and we’re starting to see, that design and workplace strategy and build-out is going to be a real opportunity as people reconfigure the square footage that they have.
It is clear that the future of the office real estate, alongside everything else in the world, is changing at a rapid pace - and Unispace is a company that is allowing for these changes to take place on a global level, in an easier way.
What do you think about the future of office real estate? Let me know in the comments below.