Industries such as the outsourcing and offshoring, which are related to the new wave of tenants occupying important part of the office buildings, are so unpredictable, that the office owners are not succeeding anymore to sign 7-10 years lease agreements, such as with the large corporations, she added.
„The effort of communication with tenants has increased. The owners are now out of their shell and they are calling the clients, taking them out for a coffee once a month and trying to prevent their problems. They understood this need to create a community “, Ilinca Păun said during a seminar about the digitalization of the commercial real estate sector.
She admits that the real estate brokers were for many years as the taxi drivers, taking their clients to see the available projects for rent. „The time of arrogance and of the real estate easy deals is gone, and now the decision process of the clients is more and more complicated. The brokerage turned into business consultancy “, she added.
According to her, the need for physical space will be substantially modified on medium term, adapting to new business models.
„In Western Europe, the corporatist model is obsolete and the freelancer model is emerging. There is a large wave of young people which doesn’t believe anymore in the large corporations and they want their own business. In these conditions you don’t need any more the physical space. We could anticipate that in ten years, the buildings will not be occupied anymore only by a company, but they will be rented hourly to the entrepreneurs and lots of flexibility will be needed and a new way of selling the buildings. The owners’ businesses will complicate, as they will have to face the unpredictable, and it will be very hard to get financing“, Păun says.
She gives the example the project of a entrepreneurship faculty developed in Amsterdam, which will start its classes in Romania too next year, and which has its headquarters in a building designed as a business ecosystem.
„The main tenant of the building is the research and development division of IBM, which was offered a very low rent. The intermediary floors were rented to start-ups business related to IBM, sort of satellite floors around the corporation. Above these are the service companies working with these start-ups: IT companies developing apps, recruitment and juridical services. The upper floors include residential products rented to the businessmen working with these companies. The top floor hosts a club and the ground floor a gym. The elevator takes you to a reception in the mid-building whose concept is of relaxation space“, told Ilinca Păun. (source: capital.ro)
