Abstracts of major presentations of the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate association.
“Building New Economy Towns,” Florida World Congress, Nov. 7, 2000:
If your company is still building class A office space in remote suburban locations that force workers to spend two hours a day trapped in traffic, Andres Duany has a word of advice for you: Stop. “I don’t know how many of you hold class A office space, but get rid of it,” Duany told IDRC attendees in a standing-room-only workshop in Orlando. “Class A office buildings are all dinosaurs. The cool people wouldn’t be caught dead working in class A office space.”
His point? The tastes and demands of the work force have changed, but corporate real estate managers haven’t changed to meet them. Duany, founding principal of the architectural firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., said that the trend toward New Urbanism and Neo-Traditional design is forcing corporate space planners to re-evaluate their approach to facility placement and design.
“People are actually repulsed by the next new office building,” he said. “Very, very often, less is more. If you have formica in your elevator, tear it off and the leave the glue. People show up informally dressed and make your class A atriums look stupid.” Moreover, he added, some 25 million Americans now work from home — a sign that centralized corporate headquarters facilities are going the way of the executive wash room.
“The great American dream is not owning your own home. It is being your own boss,” said the architect who designed the new town of Seaside in Northwest Florida. “What’s ‘in’ is the old urban fabric of America. The new parallel reality are the old downtowns where people live, work and play. Contrast that with suburbia, where you need a car trip to perform every single human activity of life.”
New towns aren’t just more functional; they’re what people want, said Richard Florida, professor at the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University. “What’s really new about the New Economy is a shift from a company-dominated world to a world where the people call the shots,” he said. “And that affects all of us. It makes place more important now than ever before.”
“Perfecting Critical E-Real Estate Infrastructures While Sustaining Corporate Competitive Advantage,” Florida World Congress, Nov. 8, 2000:
How do you plan for your company’s future e-business needs? More importantly, how do you pay for them? Those two questions should be at the forefront of the thinking of corporate real estate executives, according to Bill McNee, president of Saugatuck Technology and a fellow at The Gartner Group, a leading consulting firm in the information technology arena.
“Our research shows that through 2003, about 75 percent of all enterprises will under-budget their e-business transformation costs by 50 percent or more,” said McNee. “That is because we don’t yet understand the integration costs of business-to-business. They typically show up 150 percent over budget.”
With B2B e-commerce expected to grow from $45 billion in 1998 to $403 billion within three years, it is absolutely critical that companies plan ahead for every aspect of their e-business transformation, said McNee. “One thing we know now is that pure dot-com business models will not dominate in the future. In reality, we are seeing a real migration toward a bricks-and-clicks model of doing business.”
