Features

Foreign investment in China is poised to take off, particularly if the Asian mega-market is permitted to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). Every sector of the Chinese economy shows signs of growth, from investments in infrastructure to renovation of state-owned firms and industries to the emergence of a major service industry. Politics aside, China […]

Freshwater is the lubricant that fuels development. And that means development is in trouble: “Forget oil. In the 21st century water will be king. Already, a supertanker full of water from a pure source . . . is worth more than any supertanker full of oil to thirsty populations in Asia,” says U.S. Congressman Bob […]

Oracle sees blazing changes on Europe’s horizon: “Combine globalization’s thrust, the e-commerce surge and the Euro’s emergence, and you’ll see e-commerce blow through Europe like a whirlwind. The single currency has amplified the velocity of change, broadening and flattening the playing field. E-commerce is impacting our own European operations in a big way, and it’s […]

The U.S. government as a leading-edge indicator? The notion may seem farfetched, but that’s definitely the case with the U.S. General Service Administration (GSA at www.gsa.gov). For the two straight years, the GSA has garnered prestigious Best Practice Awards from the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate association. The organization […]

China’s challenges were center stage at IDRC’s record-breaking March 27-28 Beijing World Congress, “Asia and Corporate Real Estate: Global Infrastructure Rises to the Next Level,” which drew an Asian record turnout of 172. “This Congress was a marker in China’s future development,” said presenter Marcel De Meirleir of Ernst & Young. RIGHT: Lois Dougan Tretiak […]

An increasing number of companies are turning to the concept of “shared services” to lower operating expenses and gain competitive advantage. Briefly defined, shared services consolidates accounting, human resources (HR), real estate and other transactional operations to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. As a management technique, shared services falls into the process-oriented family of […]

Start Me Up: Phoenix, Las Vegas Rated No. 1 Cities Startups are costly, risky business. But Phoenix and Las Vegas are the U.S. locations most conducive to startups’ health, according to new research from Cambridge, Mass.-based Cognetics (www.cogonline.com) (headed by David Birch, considered “the granddaddy of gazelles”). Those two cities are the respective two top […]

Of all the management skills required of today’s corporate real estate manager, none is more elusive than the requirement that he have soothsaying skills. After all, predicting real estate space requirements is central to an organization’s ability to manage physical assets wisely and, as importantly, strategically. Real estate clairvoyance is known in professional circles as […]

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie is on intimate terms with persistence. Just ask Richard Branson. Branson recently announced that he was shopping for an Australian headquarters site. But the Virgin Atlantic chairman already had a location short list that was truly short: It included only Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest, best known cities. Faced with […]

The United Kingdom attracted more new and expanded corporate facilities in 1999 than any other European country. France took the runner-up position, while Germany ranked third. Those results are essentially a photocopy of 1998’s facilities race, in which the same three countries took the top three spots, based on Ernst & Young’s European Investment Monitor […]