{"id":3101,"date":"2021-07-30T14:47:51","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T14:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.angmarrealty.com\/?p=3101"},"modified":"2021-07-30T14:51:56","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T14:51:56","slug":"dallas-is-ready-to-get-back-to-the-office-but-the-cre-ground-has-shifted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angmarrealty.com\/dallas-is-ready-to-get-back-to-the-office-but-the-cre-ground-has-shifted\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas Is Ready To Get Back To The Office, But The CRE Ground Has Shifted"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Dallas\u2019 commercial real estate community appears bullish that at least 85% of workers will be back at the office live and in person in some capacity by January 2022 \u2014 not a bad bet given the industry\u2019s go-to post-pandemic metric,\u00a0Kastle Systems keyless entry system tracker, shows nearly 5 in 10 are already there.<\/p>

But anyone thinking it will be straight back to business as usual is likely to be disappointed. As flat as predictions \u201cCovid-19 will change everything\u201d have fallen, so too might hopes it has changed nothing.<\/p>

\u201cI don’t think we’ll ever get back, quite frankly, to what we saw pre-pandemic,\u201d\u00a0HqO\u00a0Senior Account Executive Clay Curlee said at\u00a0Bisnow<\/em>\u2019s The Evolution of DFW Office event this week, adding the coronavirus pandemic had accelerated trends already in motion, including the way tenants use space.<\/p>

\u201cI don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing,\u201d Curlee said. \u201cWhen you look at best-in-class landlords, they will prevail, they will have fuller space. [But] I think that they’ll find their tenants are doing more with less. Just being a realist, I don’t think you’re ever going to see quite the same usage that you saw prior.\u201d<\/p>

ARCO\/Murray\u00a0Vice President Lauren Ladowski said she is seeing a range of reactions as the worst of the pandemic subsides and companies begin summoning employees back to work. One large\u00a0fintech\u00a0client in\u00a0Westlake, she said, is operating \u201cas if Covid never happened,\u201d filling its 50K-plus SF facility with workers operating in cramped 150 SF cubicles. On the other side of the spectrum, a client with 35K SF in\u00a0Addison\u00a0is downsizing to a new 11K\u00a0SF facility in\u00a0Richardson\u00a0and embracing a flexible office hoteling environment with collaborative space.<\/p>

\u201cI think what we’re going to see moving forward is everyone really optimizing their square footage, and that might mean something different for every culture, company and firm, depending on what their employees need and what they need to retain those employees,\u201d she said. \u201cBut focusing on amenity spaces, collaboration areas and making sure that you don’t have wasted space within your office footprints is a trend that’s going to continue driving usage [going] forward.\u201d<\/p>

Panelists agreed that small companies are leading the way on the\u00a0return to office, in large part because they are unencumbered by national or global corporate policies.\u00a0Hillwood Urban\u00a0Senior Vice President\u00a0Walt Zartman\u00a0said some large corporations, including big accounting firms, that were heavily reliant on hoteling throughout the Covid crisis are still struggling to rewrite their real estate models.<\/p>

\u201cThey’re in a mess right now, because they don’t know how to figure it out,\u201d he said.<\/p>

\u201cWe’ve got a couple of tenants, big corporate users, where it’s a ghost town at these wonderful new facilities,\u201d\u00a0KDC\u00a0Senior Vice President\u00a0Bill Guthrey\u00a0said.\u00a0\u201cWhile there might be a desire to get everybody back in, a lot of these big corporations are looking at their entire global landscape and can’t do something unique in certain markets. They have to consider the concerns and the legal aspects of … pushing people back to work and how do we get it done?\u201d<\/p>

That might sound discouraging in the short term. But panelists agreed the DFW market is robust enough to adapt by continuing to attract a disproportionate share of office employment growth nationally, pointing to big deals on the horizon like Goldman Sachs\u2019 hunt for up to 1M SF\u00a0in the area as well as Peloton\u2019s announcement late last year that it would quadruple its footprint at Legacy Central in Plano.<\/p>

WorkSuites\u00a0President and CEO\u00a0Flip Howard, who calls the\u00a0coworking\u00a0industry the office canary in a coal mine, has seen his coworking business roar back since December, culminating in the company\u2019s best seven-month stretch ever. He expects coworking space, which now accounts for 2% of all office space, to eventually encompass up to 30%. The reason: flexibility.<\/p>

\u201cAnd it\u2019s not all enterprise users, it\u2019s everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cThe other thing that we’re seeing that is surprising is even from the landlord side, when we go to buildings looking for more space, it used to be, \u2018Yeah, we’d like a floor of coworking, but let’s see if we can get this law firm in here first. Now it’s the exact opposite of that. It\u2019s \u2018If we don’t have coworking in our building, we need a floor of that.\u2019 We\u2019re even hearing about tech tenants requiring there to be a coworking floor in a building before they’ll even consider taking another floor of that building.\u201d<\/p>

And, for every footprint readjustment, panelists said, there is business to take up the slack.<\/p>

\u201cI think there is a reduction in footprint, [but] Dallas will be able to absorb that better than any other place in the country,\u201d Transwestern Senior Vice President Billy Gannon said.<\/p>

\u201cWhen companies look around, they’re like, \u2018Hey, we want to hire, we want to grow our company.\u2019 But if you’ve got a national footprint, you’re going to do it where the state’s open, it’s business-friendly, there’s low taxes, low regulations and good, qualified hidden labor versus having to do that [in] Seattle, San Francisco or New York. It makes all the sense in the world, and if we reduce our footprint by 5% here, we’ll exceed it by bringing in an extra 10%, 15% [there].\u201d<\/p>

BIZNNOW. (2021, July 16).\u00a0 Dallas Is Ready To Get Back To The Office, But The CRE Ground Has Shifted. [News post]. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.bisnow.com\/dallas-ft-worth\/news\/office\/dallas-is-ready-for-back-to-work-but-the-cre-ground-has-shifted-109576<\/p>

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Dallas\u2019 commercial real estate community appears bullish that at least 85% of workers will be back at the office live and in person in some capacity by January 2022 \u2014 not a bad bet given the industry\u2019s go-to post-pandemic metric,\u00a0Kastle Systems keyless entry system tracker, shows nearly 5 in 10 are already there. But anyone … <\/p>\n

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