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Lights, Camera, CIR: Video Newest IDRC Web Offering

With IDRC?s Corporate Infrastructure ResourcesSM (CIR) management concept garnering headlines in major media like The New York Times, new opportunities are opening to reinforce the association?s message to the asset management profession. Accordingly, IDRC has streamed a new video outlining membership benefits onto its newly updated Web site. In the seven-and-a-half minute video, Set Your […]

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Watching Where Your Money Goes

European Office Costs: Brussels a Bargain Brussels is Europe?s office bargain at US$29.62 per sq. ft. a year, while London, with comparable costs of $116.70, is the land of the big occupancy-cost spenders, according to CB Richard Ellis? (www.cbcommercial.com) recent survey. Of 17 major European cities, Rome and Vienna respectively ranked Nos. 2 and 3 […]

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Siegelman Helps Honda’s Star Fall on Alabama

They?re living large in Alabama economic development circles, reveling in landing one of the year?s most coveted deals: Honda?s US$450 million, 1,500-employee plant, a 1.7-million-sq.-ft. (153,000-sq.-m.) behemoth that will rise on a 1,350-acre (540-ha.) tract in Lincoln, a small Talladega County town of some 3,600 residents 35 miles (56 km.) east of Birmingham. Undoubtedly some […]

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Tenants Head for the Hills as Europe’s Latin Market Heats Up – World Reports, Site Selection magazine – September, 1999

With Europe?s economic revival gathering strength, the continent?s Latin markets are heating up, and crowding in historic city centers is sending occupiers heading for the hills. In Madrid, the business surge last year boosted takeup 20 percent to a 5.55 million sq. ft. (500,000 sq. m.), a high for the 1990s that has squeezed vacancy […]

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Ontario Power Generation Wins Corporate Appreciation Award

Ontario Power Generation — North America?s biggest electric utility in generating capacity — is an invaluable member of the economic development team that?s helping make Ontario a leader in the chase for new business. In fact, OPG (the electricity generation successor to the former Ontario Hydro) recently won the Economic Developers Council of Ontario?s inaugural […]

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CIGNA’s Infrastructure Integration: Remaking The Corporation

One of the late 20th century?s most significant business trends, infrastructure integration is an idea whose time has come — and with it, a new role for real estate. Case in point: CIGNA corporate real estate?s (CRE) innovative Vision 3 Initiative, which merited a prestigious Best Practices Award from the International Development Research Council (IDRC), […]

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Ready or Not, Here Comes Y2K

If only the Y2K bug could be gotten rid of as easily as its counterparts in the natural world. It cannot, of course, and there is a palpable sense of foreboding surrounding the run-up to Jan. 1, 2000, when non-Y2K-compliant computers will assume it?s 1900. There is an even stronger sense in some circles that […]

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Web Site Describes the Reach of the Y2K Bug

Those looking for immediate insights into real estate-related risk exposure tied to the Y2K bug can find extensive coverage of the topic at www.y2krealestate.com, a Web site operated by Millennium Strategies Group, LLC, a Denver, Colo.-based consultancy. The site lists building operating systems at risk and provides links to numerous articles detailing the various technical […]

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Essential Electronic Services for Corporate Real Estate Executives

In the coming years, one of the most important service providers to the corporate real estate profession will be a modem-equipped computer. Traditional service providers of all stripes are automating their services where possible in order to reduce their own overhead and to quench clients? thirst for convenient, customizable access to services. As corporate infrastructure […]

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Level 3: Building a Business Power at Broadband Speed

“If you?re in a pretty strong telecom market position, you?re in a difficult situation,” says Kevin O?Hara, the intensely alert, 38-year-old COO of red-hot Level 3 Communications (www.level3.com). O?Hara?s words may seem to fly in the face of conventional business wisdom. Like Elvis, however, conventional wisdom has left the building. The telecom business, O?Hara explains, […]

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Telecom Infrastructure: The New Facility Backbone

In the “Information Age,” telecommunications is as much a part of a community?s backbone as is its highways, railways and waterways. Now, businesses study not only an area?s physical and human infrastructure when locating a facility, but its telecom capabilities as well. And as telecommunications activities increase in the fast-paced global economy, the need for […]

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Build It Big and They Will Come: ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ Reshape the Location Landscape

Call it “physiostructure.” We might as well, since “infostructure” is now an established part of the site selection lexicon. In fact, much of this SS issue is a veritable hymn to how information infrastructure has dramatically altered where, when and how we work, transforming a 9-to-5 workplace that was as tightly defined as the facility […]

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How to Select an Optimal Distribution Site

Common business wisdom used to hold that if you built a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your doorstep. But that was before people started shopping over the Internet and expecting almost instantaneous delivery of the products they ordered. Today, a growing number of customers demand exceptional logistics service from their vendors. […]

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Workplace/Cyberspace Connection Expanding Infrastructure Integration?s Scope

Aha, Michael Jordan, so it wasn?t the shoes after all, eh? It was the work space. Or maybe it was the work space at Converse, where basketball master Jordan originally assumed he?d sign for his 1984-85 pro rookie season. Then, however, he visited Converse?s offices and decided ?they just looked traditional.? So the fiercely innovative […]

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Detangling the Deregulation Web

If there?s one sure thing that you can say about utility deregulation, it?s that it?s complicated. Some states are deregulated, some aren?t, and some are in the process of deregulating. New services and products are coming online regularly, and new terms in the energy-shopping arena are popping up everyday — so many things to learn, […]

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1998 Top 10 Utility Companies

 SEPTEMBER 1999  SITE SELECTION  1998 TOP 10 UTILITY  COMPANIES   • COVER PAGE    •  CINERGY/PSI    •  DETROIT EDISON    •  ENTERGY’S       TEAMWORK       ARKANSAS    •  GEORGIA POWER       COMPANY    •  MEMPHIS LIGHT,       GAS & WATER       DIVISION    •  MIDAMERICAN       ENERGY COMPANY    •  NEBRASKA PUBLIC       POWER DISTRICT    •  OMAHA PUBLIC       POWER DISTRICT    •  PP&L    •  […]

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A Vision of the New Workplace Revisited

Introduction: Origins of this PaperIn April 1993, the International Development Research Council?s journal, Industrial Development, published an article entitled “A Vision of the New Workplace.” (Industrial Development ran in Site Selection magazine for several years.) The authors were Francis Duffy from London-based DEGW, an architect who has spent most of his career studying and acting […]

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A Major REIT Is Not Too Heavy To Ride the E

In March 1999, distribution facilities giant ProLogis, an Aurora, Colo.-based real estate investment trust (REIT), acquired Meridian Industrial Trust, another leading manager and developer of distribution facilities, resulting in a global powerhouse with a market capitalization in excess of US$6.7 billion. ProLogis, with more than 168 million square feet (15.6 million sq. m.) under development […]

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IDRC Abstracts

A look at recent major presentations of the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent association of corporate real estate professionals. “Interactive Member Survey and Awards Luncheon,” IDRC San Antonio Fall World Congress for Corporate Real Estate Executives, Nov. 2, 1998: This interactive survey provides likely the most persuasive evidence of the growing importance […]

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IDRC Log: IDRC Expands Electronic Member Services Menu

IDRC, the world’s leading professional association for corporate real estate executives, is going electronic with its membership services offerings. “Members on the Web” will include a number of new interactive features through IDRCNet, the group’s World Wide Web site in response to the growth of event registrations and other services on line. “Visits on IDRCNet […]

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Decision Data: Watching Where Your Money Goes

Relocation: What’s Your Currency Conversion? How far will your employees’ current salaries go in a new location? Homefair’s Web site (www2.homefair.com) provides online assistance in that important currency conversion. We randomly picked 10 U.S. cities and calculated how far a US$100,000 salary in relatively low-cost Peoria, Ill., would go in each. And $100,000 of Peoria […]

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Winner & Giver: Peace wins Krafsur Award

Awards range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the Nobel Prize to a Hair Club for Men’s vice presidency. A major yardstick for any award, though, is who wins it. Clearly, that standard elevates the Krafsur Award. The award’s consistently high quality was again evident at the New England World Congress of the International […]

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IDRC’s Cannes Conference: Infrastructure Integration In the New Europe

C annes, France: Integration of a new and different sort is advancing on the new Europe: Like their U.S. corporate counterparts, European companies are feeling the pressure to maximize the synergies of their corporate infrastructure resources (CIR). Responding to the accelerated pace of workplace change generated by rapidly evolving technology, European firms are looking for […]

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Quebec: Building Partnerships In the Americas

[Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from a speech by Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard in New York City on April 15.] I am very pleased to be back in New York City. On my last visit, three years ago, I had just become Premier of Quebec, and I spoke about our goal of turning around […]

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