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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 […]

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 […]

Cannes, France: It looks like a second Normandy landing here in the south of France: As Europe’s recovery settles into a long upward leg, U.S. investors are invading, grabbing buildings and real estate securities like they’re going out of style. And that surge will likely multiply the shares of real estate investment companies beginning to […]

“Many already use the Internet, yet I doubt many are using it for construction management. The speed of connectivity and the range of companies committed to working on the Internet are growing so fast that this will cease to be a business obstacle within a very short time frame. Your entire team will build the […]

Ever since Michael Hammer, the guru of Business Process Re-engineering, made the observation years ago that the business world has not adequately considered the effect re-engineering has on the notion of workplace, work space design experts have struggled to understand the relationship between the two concepts. What role does workspace really play in productivity? Can […]

Labor may be spare, but it’s out there. And broad-ranging corporate strategies are finding it. What would you ask for if you could get just about any expansion incentive imaginable? That was the situation for United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1998. Its new cargo-sorting hub would employ 6,000-plus with a US$250 million annual payroll. Clearly, […]

Universities and proactive businesses are crafting ever-more-relevant job training programs designed to give employers in their area an edge in the labor pool. Work-force training programs are seeing substantial inflows of capital as state and local economic development agencies seek to make their available workers more competitive. This is among the findings of a recent […]

Opening nine major U.S. customer service centers in a mere three years, Sprint PCS has fine-tuned a system for rapidly adding the labor others can’t even find. b y     J A C K     L Y N E “Finding a place with higher unemployment is ideal. But you’re not going to find a U.S. […]

“Leadership,” says Warren Benis, “can’t be taught; it must be learned, grown through experiences.” The industry’s experience grew a bit on Apr. 30, as Site Selection presented its Corporate Real Estate Leadership Awards to eight executives, chosen by SS’s editorial board from industry-wide nominations. (Two other winners were tapped as “Editors’ Picks.”) Appropriately, the Leadership […]

Site Selection: HQ’s real estate holdings are growing by leaps and bounds, thanks to the merger of Frontline Capital’s serviced office unit, VANTAS, with HQ’s properties. What is your role in managing this growth? Ron Adam (right): Completion of the deal is a little ways off, but we’re now in an interim period, which is […]

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 […]

What’s upbeat, on the rise and ranges between 4 and 6.3 percent? Answer: current gross domestic product forecasts for four of Southeast Asia’s biggest economies. Indeed, the 2000 economic outlook for Malaysia (where growth over 1999 is expected to hit 6.3 percent), Singapore (6 percent), Thailand (5 percent) and the Philippines (4.5 percent) is decidedly […]

Traditional businesses can rest easier: NASDAQ’s recent violent nature is a symptom of the impending collapse of dozens of former online darlings. As it turns, out solid business plans, management-team depth, effective business models (however boring), customer service, competitive advantages, and (duh) profits really do matter. The dot-com’s e-retail strategy — spending millions of dollars […]

You’d expect the president of the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) to be an unabashed supporter of business investment into America’s neighbor and No. 1 trading partner — and an articulate voice explaining the country’s many location advantages. And David Amos is. Amos, who is also director of economic development for the city of […]

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there,” humorist Will Rogers once observed. That says a lot about leadership, an eternally discussed but skimpily understood business success factor. When it comes to real estate leadership, though, a case study is at hand: the alliance between UnitedHealth Group […]

A new research report, IDRC’s Defining Characteristics, charts the leading real estate association’s evolution from site selection resource to business strategy group, and beyond. Organizations that resist change or cannot change will soon find themselves on the endangered species list in the business world. The forces of technology, entrepreneurship and globalization are too powerful to […]

The Johnson Controls USA Office Costs Index [See Tables One, Two, Three and Chart A for data] The Johnson Controls USA Office Occupancy Costs Index is based on a detailed model of a medium grade air-conditioned office building, which operates reasonably efficiently with no unusually high service standards or demands. The building is 160,000 rentable […]

A business cost survey is the centerpiece of a Web-based service that lets “eCities” get the word out concerning local business development opportunities. Corporate site seekers now have yet another way to access key cost-of-doing-business data in markets around the USA via the Internet. The Kosmont Cost of Doing Business Survey tm, published by Kosmont […]

Economic development groups are among those likely to participate in the Keystone State’s newly designed Web site, PA PowerPort, an Internet portal for business development. Pennsylvania is broadening its efforts to be recognized as a technologically savvy place in which to grow a business. The Keystone State’s various public-private technology partnerships and healthy business climate […]

If you build it, will they dot.com? Not necessarily. More accurately, if you dot.com it, you’d better build. 1999, you see, was the year in which some of the Internet’s leading lights decided that they needed big-time bricks to make their clicks work. That concrete lesson in real estate realities is part of the story […]

The customer is king in today’s hotly competitive environment, and expansion-minded corporate clients across the country received royal treatment from Site Selection‘s 1999 top development groups. Those organizations parlayed customer commitment into impressive bottom-line results, attracting an average of US$461 million in capital investments and 3,002 new jobs last year. Taking care of the customer […]

Identify an opportunity, then seize it. Although an obvious oversimplification, that’s the formula for business success. With real estate and facilities playing a critical role in writing corporate success stories, it’s essential that site seekers keep a close eye on where new business-location opportunities are cropping up around the world. And they’re turning up in […]

“We have a mantra in Dell corporate real estate: Set unrealistic expectations . . . and then exceed them,” says Kip Thompson, flashing a smile that’s both playfully devilish and dead serious. Yeah, right, you say? After all, real estate by nature is a long-term process: 24 months to build a facility, 16-18 months if […]

Imagine having the technological resources to run highly effective corporate real estate-related meetings around the country-or world-in a single day without leaving your office. Sound far-fetched? Here is a glimpse into the corporate real estate profession 10 years from now. We all know that the Internet is changing the way business is conducted in almost […]