In the world of corporate site selection, once the geographic search parameter has been narrowed down from, say, the entire Eastern United States, to a specific metro area, the real estate aspect of the process begins to take on a much greater importance.
At this stage, your corporate site location team has satisfactorily vetted the big picture issues like work force quality and availability, the regional transportation and logistics infrastructure, cost of living, tax and regulatory environment, and schools and healthcare costs from the corporate perspective, to name just a few.
Now it’s time to focus on a specific piece of real estate.
At this point, your options are basically twofold, depending largely upon how quickly you need to be up and operating in your new location. You can either build from scratch (the Greenfield option) or move into an existing building and modify it to meet your specific requirements.
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There are a lot of efficiencies to be gained from working in an environment where employees can walk to a restaurant for lunch, or take care of simple errands like dry cleaning, or drop off and pick up kids from a day care facility, all within minutes of the office.
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Obviously, the Greenfield option involves a significantly longer, and more complicated, timeline, but there are instances when that is clearly the best option. Auto assembly plants and wafer fabrication facilities immediately come to mind.
Generally, though, if you’re looking for an industrial use facility, you have several options that offer you much of the flexibility of a Greenfield site, but without a lot of the red tape and long lead times. Industrial parks, shell buildings and recently vacated light manufacturing plants all offer you the ability to greatly accelerate your occupancy date, and probably reduce your upfront costs as well.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for office space for a corporate or regional headquarters, or for a high-end customer service operation, one of the hot button items among real estate developers these days is the mixed-use development, where they introduce a blend of retail, residential, hotel and office to create what many refer to as “new urbanism.”
There are a lot of efficiencies to be gained from working in an environment where employees can walk to a restaurant for lunch, or take care of simple errands like dry cleaning, or drop off and pick up kids from a day care facility, all within minutes of the office. That kind of convenience is important to people, as witnessed by the fact that most corporate campuses of any size usually contract to have those facilities operated on their premises.
One of the most intractable problems with locating in most downtowns in the U.S. is that most of your employees don’t live there. They live in the suburbs. That trend began in earnest following World War II and shows no sign of abating, no matter how much we may wish that it would.
Employers follow the work force, and that means they, too, have moved out to the suburbs. Still, there is still a lot to be said for locating offices in a classic urban environment, albeit without the $150 a month parking expenses.
A mixed-use development provides a good compromise in the urban-suburban conundrum, taking advantage of the best of each environment. If your company is considering a major office expansion or relocation, it’s certainly worth looking into.
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