When you no longer need shops to go shopping, or offices to work in, the fundamental purpose of the real estate industry has to change. We have to make people WANT what we’re selling. What can you do in X real estate better than anywhere else? How do you create spaces and places that are desirable? Is the real estate itself the attraction or the intangibles layered on top of it?

Yesterday I spent 2.5 hours (yet another 2.5 hours) reading/listening/watching ‘Metaverse’ content. And still nothing transpired of much interest at all. Mostly verbiage about ‘gonna change the world’ … with ZERO supporting evidence. Getting very tedious:( Closest to being beneficial was using VR to inspect buildings pre build. Which is a bit of a no brainer. But has also been a thing for years, and is just ‘VR’ not the bloody‘Metaverse’.

Is it time Real Estate addressed the elephant in the room. Or rather, two elephants?

The two I have in mind are IAQ and Sustainability.

Given the pandemic and the latest IPCC report, should we not be: A) Insisting every building demonstrates, in real time, their indoor air quality. Why are we even thinking of returning to offices that cannot demonstrate they are healthy places to be?

CBRE gives up on Hana and folds it into an investment in Industrious. Meaning? Start with 👇 In my #SpaceAsAService presentation this is the first of 8 factors determining success. Based on the joke about the difference between the chicken & pig in a bacon & egg sandwich. The chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

Not a good article but this endlessly repeated line of ‘Covid is accelerating trends’ is, I think, completely wrong. It feels like that but most of these trends were happening so slowly and were niche, not mainstream.

https://twitter.com/jgforsyth/status/1345316861152538624

Most prominently remote working is not a trend that has been simply accelerated. It was 5% or so in the U.K. before and largely based around working from home 1 day a week. An acceleration of that trend would not have got us where we are going.

👇 Rather baffled why this is not made more of in CRE. Someone actually said to me ‘air quality will become less of a ‘thing’ now we have vaccines coming’. NO NO NO: Do not sign any lease without knowing what they are doing to ensure excellent IAQ. Top issue.

https://twitter.com/kathf48/status/1345298831559290881

BTW that comment was from an investor. I think many have assets where the ability to have excellent IAQ is low or non existent. So hoping we all ignore it, like pre Covid. But must not happen. Sell these assets before the market clicks, or cough up and upgrade your building.

👇 Yes. All change, all change. Especially in U.K. Whatever the opposite of ‘levelling up’ is, is about to start. Big winners & losers. The digital economy set to thrive as analogue world grinds to a red tape induced standstill. Brexiters won, but will now lose.

https://twitter.com/drorpoleg/status/1344962642738348033

“the digitally enabled ones were ready for this moment”. google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.ft.c…

Interesting academic report on why working from home will stick post pandemic. bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl… Who wants to work from home (or remotely) and for how long. 64% 2 or more days a week.

The lack of innovation about innovation is disheartening. Just read yet another article mansplaining (these articles always seem to be written by men) that innovation only happens .... .... in cities (of more than 1 million people), in the office, face to face. Innovation cannot happen digitally, humans cannot understand nuance online, we are incapable of managing our online activities to avoid ‘Zoom fatigue’, and bonding & mentoring is impossible remotely.

Seems clear that most office workers will not be returning to the office five days a week. Some (5-10%) might, and the same % might never return. But consensus developing that 1/2/3/4 days a week in the office is enough, probably with the average being 2/3 days.

Very much still in the thinking stage re the move to remote working (who does how much etc) but increasingly wondering if contemplating how existing companies will act is missing the point. 1/n As it stands now I think remote for existing companies will be classic bell curve. Maybe 5-10% always remote, 5-10% always in the office. Then a distribution of those 1/2/3/4 days a week remote. With average circa 2/3 days in the office or remote. But ...

Everyone is saying we’ve hit peak flying, and conferences will move online. I think this will proves to be wrong. Data Centres put out the same carbon emissions as the aviation industry, roughly 2% of global total. But if everyone gets used to remote working you could see this increasing dramatically. Not hard to see the use of Zoom etc increasing 10-1000 times.

Wondering how many office centric companies could not move to a work from home strategy? It might not be your preferred option but should be pretty easy to switch to.
gensler.com/research-insig… Reducing longer term office footprint down to a core (that will be utilised 70%+), investing in productivity enhancing workplace tech, and placing big focus on health & wellbeing could be a trend that is turbo charged by Coronavirus.

Had an excellent time giving the opening keynote @GRIClubGlobal Offices conference in London yesterday. Smart and senior audience. Very clear that the value proposition and value pecking order is changing fast. I think this is the critical point. Companies will be buying a smart service not a dumb product in the future. WHO delivers that will extract the greatest value. What is unclear is who that is.