Search Results for: commercial

August 18, 2015

Car sharing and longer commutes are the keys to workforce mobility ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Cities, Flexible working, News

The Government should introduce new policies to incentivise people to car share and travel further afield to find work. Those are two of the key finding of a new report, On The Move, from the think tank Policy Exchange which sets out ways to improve the mobility of the British workforce. Making it easier for people to commute twenty minutes further afield would put them in touch with at least one additional major urban area and potentially 10,000 more job opportunities, according to the report. Additionally, it suggests that drivers who offer fellow commuters a lift should be given a tax break. The authors claim that in a third of local authorities that make up the eight city regions no major employment sites (defined as having 5,000 or more jobs) are within a twenty minute commute by public transport and 80 percent of these Local Authorities have an unemployment rate above the national average.

August 14, 2015

Apathy, laxity and ineptitude continue to dog data security issues ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology

How firms must hanker for the days when the issue of corporate data security could usually be addressed simply by asking what somebody had in their bag when they left the building or were fired. Amongst other things, the practice of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) means that the ways for data to leak out of the organisation are now numerous, if not generally malicious. A new cluster of reports has emerged that highlight how carelessness, indifference, cultural ineptitude and the complexities of unmanaged, privately owned technology make it increasingly difficult for firms to maintain the security of their data. While some of the sources of this leakage are generally well known, a couple that are not generally acknowledged is the apathy of employees when it comes to keeping work files safe and secure and the lax attitude of employers when breaches occur.

August 10, 2015

London is leading the way in the global coworking revolution ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Property, Workplace design

Changing attitudes amongst occupiers towards office space and the explosion in the numbers of freelance workers and microbusinesses are driving an upsurge in coworking and other flexible working environments worldwide. That is the key conclusion of a new report from DTZ which claims that the number of dedicated flexible working locations worldwide is likely to hit 50,000 over the next three years, with parts of London leading the way. We reported recently how coworking pioneer WeWork has already announced its plans to dominate London’s commercial property scene in the same way it already does Manhattan’s. Now, the How You Work report from DTZ suggests that this is the shape of things to come for many cities, with London leading the way alongside a tranche of global tech and creative centres such as New York, Berlin and Shanghai.

August 6, 2015

Government publishes details of £118 bn pipeline of construction projects ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Knowledge, News, Property, Public Sector

The UK Government, in conjunction with construction industry data specialist Barbour ABI, has published a full detailed list of around £118 billion of publicly funded building projects scheduled for the next five years. You can find the pipeline as a spreadsheet here, with the data broken down by sector and including some basic data for each project. The Government has also introduced a dedicated website with details of the projects with updates to the raw data available via both the central government website and at data.gov.uk. The government construction pipeline is now updated twice a year which the Government claims will ‘extend its reach beyond the major construction spending departments and improve the integrity of the data’ and demonstrate its commitment ‘to continuous engagement with industry and government clients on current use and future improvements’.

July 29, 2015

Public sector lagging behind in use of technology and flexible working

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Public Sector, Technology

As we reported last week, the UK public sector is embracing some interesting new ideas in the way it uses real estate, especially its commitment to get rid of some of it by adopting flexible working and shared space. However, it’s one thing looking to use space in more flexible ways but without the technological infrastructure, it’s hard to see how they will be able to achieve as much as they could. It is in this regard that they are lagging behind their contemporaries in the private sector, according to a new report from O2 and YouGov. While the report, Redefining selling, serving and working, offers up the usual appeals for us all to make more use of the sorts of things O2 wants us to buy, there is plenty of interesting detail to tease out once the pinch of salt has been applied, not least how business practices and the way people use technology vary across sectors.

July 27, 2015

Coworking juggernaut WeWork announces plans to dominate London

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Property, Workplace design

Earlier this month, US based coworking juggernaut WeWork announced that it had opened the UK’s largest space of its kind in Moorgate in East London. Now, according to a report in the journal CoStar, the firm is looking to become a major tenant in the commercial property market in London in the same way that it has come to dominate Manhattan. According to the report, WeWork is looking to acquire over 1 million sq. ft. of space in the capital over the next 18 months as it seeks to provide coworking space for its growing customer base of young creative and technology businesses and other start ups. If it succeeds in finding the space it wants, the firm will have quadrupled the commercial property it occupies in London to 1.5 million sq. ft. WeWork is already Manhattan’s largest tenant and is now valued at $10 billion, having started in 2010.

July 24, 2015

Groundbreaking public sector estate scheme rolled out nationwide

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, News, Property, Public Sector

We’ve reported previously on the Government’s One Public Sector Estate scheme, which encourages local authorities to find ways to share office space and find other ways of divesting buildings as well as freeing up land for development. Over the past two years there has been a phased rollout of the scheme to 32 councils. Now the Cabinet Office and the Local Government Association claim they have gauged the success of the first two phases and are confident the scheme can be expanded nationwide. Their announcement suggests that the 32 councils who are currently on the programme own 28 percent of council land and property assets in England and have applied the ideas of the One Public Sector Estate Initiative to free up land for around 9,000 homes and create some 20,000 new jobs. The councils involved are also expected to raise £129 million in capital receipts from land sales and cut running costs by £77 million over 5 years.

July 24, 2015

Growth in demand for scarce office space will lead to rents rise

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

Demand from business for commercial property rose for the eleventh consecutive quarter, while available space fell for the ninth successive period, according to the latest RICS Commercial Market Survey. As a result, rents are expected to rise at the fastest pace since the survey began in 1998 with 46 percent more respondents forecasting higher, rather than lower, rent rates going forward. Offices remain the segment of the market where rental expectations remain most buoyant, while retail continues to lag, although even in this area, momentum is picking up. Across the whole of the UK, but excluding the capital, 95 percent of respondents believe that current commercial market valuations are either at or below fair value (roughly unchanged since Q1 2015). However, in London 50 percent of contributors now feel that commercial office space valuations are ‘expensive’ – an increase from 45 percent in the first quarter of this year.

July 14, 2015

Occupiers give big thumbs down to service levels from property sector

by Neil Franklin • Facilities management, News, Property

The property sector offers its customers pretty appalling customer service, according to a ‘damning’ new report from the British Council of Offices (BCO). The study, based on the experiences of just 64 occupiers claims that fewer than one in five (17 percent) rate their property management service as “good” or “excellent” and fewer than one in three feeling that their suppliers understood their business needs. The survey found that although customer service is lacking, satisfaction with the end product itself was high, with two out of three occupiers happy with the quality of their office and three out of four perceiving quality to have improved over the past 10 years. The report sets out a 10-point action plan to improve the service occupiers receive, including adopting a new definition of “building performance” set by the BCO and encouraging more transparency.

July 10, 2015

UK Government abandons zero carbon buildings pledges

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, News, Property

The UK Government has today announced that it is to abandon its plans to introduce zero carbon buildings, including homes in 2016 and zero carbon commercial buildings in 2019. As part of a range of planning measures officially announced by the Treasury, it has been confirmed that the government ‘does not intend to proceed with the zero carbon Allowable Solutions carbon offsetting scheme, or the proposed 2016 increase in on-site energy efficiency standards’. Officials from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) have also separately confirmed that the zero carbon policy for non-domestic buildings will also be discarded as part of the new changes. The move has already been heavily criticised by the UK Green Building Council and senior figures in the construction sector, who are dismayed at the move by a Government that once claimed it was to be the UK’s ‘greenest ever’.

July 10, 2015

Local authority staff frustrated by poor quality working environments

by Mark Eltringham • Public Sector, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Employees at UK local authorities are frustrated at their poor quality working environments and councils are suffering as a result, claims a new study from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). Over two thirds (68 percent) of employees polled for the report claim their workplaces need to be upgraded and nearly all (92 percent) said they take the standard of workplace into account when deciding where to work. Furthermore, 80 percent of current employees claim they take the standard of working environment into account when making decisions about whether to remain in the current role. In an interview with LocalGov magazine, Paul Bagust, director of UK commercial property at RICS, also warned that short term cost cutting in the workplace is likely to be counterproductive in the long term.

July 7, 2015

Demand for East London offices rise as occupiers seek cost effective space

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, News, Property

The amount of leased office space in London over the first half of this year is 13 percent ahead of the same time last year, according to new research published by commercial property consultancy Cushman & Wakefield (C&W). Leasing activity totalled just over 6.26 million sq ft from January to June 2015, compared to the same point in 2014 when 5.6 million sq ft was transacted and is the highest Central London first half total since 1998, when 6.7 million sq ft was let. According to C&W, the figures presented in the report suggest that there was a significant upturn in activity in East London, with 1.2 million sq ft let, only marginally behind the City market (1.24 million sq ft) and significantly ahead of West End volumes (915,000 sq ft). East London offices take-up was at its highest level since Q4 2010 as a result of three transactions over 100,000 sq ft.