Leasing leaders from heavyweights Hongkong Land and Swire Properties came together in peace at Tuesday’s Mingtiandi Hong Kong Forum to talk about the future of the office in the global financial hub. Watch the full recording>>
With news out of the US indicating that offices there are an endangered species and that work-from-home has become a permanent feature of life, executives from the two blue-chip developers took the stage with representatives of a top design firm and a leading systems provider to explore what the future holds for Asia’s priciest office market.
Despite declining occupancy and rents, the Hong Kong situation has far to go to match the gloom pervading Manhattan, said Neil Anderson, director and head of office in the commercial property division of Hongkong Land, who addressed the audience at the Ritz-Carlton at the ICC after a recent speaking engagement in America.
“At the end of last year there was about 14 million square feet (1.3 million square metres) of vacant office space in Hong Kong,” Anderson said. “In New York City there’s 94 million square feet of empty office space. So I would rather be in Hong Kong than New York, to be quite frank, at this point in time.”
FOMO Effect
Anderson was joined in the panel discussion by Don Taylor, director of the office division at rival builder Swire Properties, as well as Simon Chua, executive director and co-founder of design consultancy Lead8, and Bernie Devine, senior regional director with Yardi, the real estate tech systems provider and sponsor of the all-day event.
Taylor echoed much of what Anderson said, telling the audience that the long-term future for Hong Kong as an office market remains “very rosy” with unique qualities setting it apart from global competitors.
“You’ve got policy support, you’ve got the natural attributes of Hong Kong in terms of an international finance centre, so I think office does have a future,” Taylor told the audience of around 200 industry executives.
Anderson made mention of what he termed the FOMO playbook — or “fear of missing out” — as a game-changer for enriching office portfolios.
“How do you create the FOMO effect? By linking your portfolio together, by getting tenants to collaborate, providing different services and different amenities, but in a collective way rather than a singular kind of B2B play, almost B2C actually in the scheme of things,” Anderson said, referring to business-to-business and business-to-consumer models.
Flex Space and Fun
Yardi made headlines recently with a deal to become the majority shareholder of WeWork as the latter restructures. But as Devine pointed out, the tech provider has been working with the flagging flex-space operator for two years already on workplace management software. In his view, the future of the office must include flex.
“I think there’s a couple things that COVID taught all of us,” Devine said. “One of them is, COVID taught us that doing all your shopping online is no fun. The other thing COVID taught us is that working from home all the time is no fun either.”
Those words found a sympathetic ear in Chua, whose Hong Kong-based Lead8 is spearheading design at Henderson Land’s Site 3 project on the Central district waterfront and at Frasers/TCC Assets’ One Bangkok mega-development in Thailand.
“For me I think it needs to be fun,” Chua said. “In addition to going to work meetings, you also need to enjoy the time outside your home.”
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