Office Tenants Choose Basics Over Frills
Forget fitness facilities.
Never mind the child-care centers.
Concierges? Just a frill.
Tenants toiling in offices are more concerned about controlling the temperature in their suites than about strolling down the hall to work out on a different kind of treadmill.
Breathing healthy air is more important to them than having a child-care center next door.
They want building managers who respond quickly to their requests, but they can do without the concierges, thank you.
These are some of the conclusions from a new survey by the Urban Land Institute and the Building Owners and Managers Assn., which collaborated to find out what’s most and least important to tenants leasing office space across the United States.
The idea behind the survey was that building owners, managers and developers can do a better job, and hence keep their buildings filled with rent-paying customers, if they know what tenants really want.
The survey confirmed some common-sense assumptions: that office tenants want affordable, comfortable buildings managed by people who answer quickly when called.
But it also produced some surprises, especially in its findings that tenants are not overly interested in fitness centers, child-care facilities, videoconferencing and teleconferencing capabilities or some of the extra attractions that today’s developers often tout.
“What clearly comes across is that a lot of the amenities that building owners and developers have incorporated in their buildings in an attempt to differentiate themselves from their competitors . . . really are not priority items to the tenants,” said Bruce Megowan, chairman of the Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles.
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Some 56% of those who answered the survey said child-care facilities are unimportant to them, and 47% indicated the same indifference toward fitness centers. Well over 60% considered videoconferencing and teleconferencing facilities to be unimportant, and 59% couldn’t care less about concierges.
Tenants often ask about these frills when considering a building, Megowan said, but “when they make the actual decision, building-management basics come to the forefront. Things like noise levels from adjacent tenants tend to be more important.”
Jo Allen Gause, a ULI development director who worked on the survey, said it showed that tenants are primarily concerned about basic needs, like working in a comfortable environment that’s not too noisy.
Controlling the office temperature was by far the biggest concern of the tenants surveyed, regardless of their industry, the size of their company or the part of the country where they’re situated, for example. Controlling the temperature in their suites was the only feature to show up on both the list of features tenants consider most important and the list of items with which they are least satisfied, she said.
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What tenants really want can be a tricky question, according to Gause. All tenants share some likes and dislikes, but some are more interested in certain features because of the nature of their business.
High-tech tenants, for example, placed more emphasis on features such as wiring for Internet access and high-speed data networks, connections for local area networks, fiber optics and conduits capable of carrying more electrical power.
“Developers and owners should really question the importance of amenities before they assume that tenants want them,” Gause said. “You have to tailor your amenities to the tenants you’re trying to attract.”
The survey was based on responses from 1,800 tenants in the United States and Canada who ranked building amenities on a scale from “very important” to “not at all important.”
Among the other results: More than 95% of those surveyed considered controlling air temperature “very important,” and 94% considered acoustics and noise control a top priority. Some 89% considered rental rates very important, and parking ranked as a top priority among most (85%). Good acoustics and controlling noise level ranked very important with 90%, but 71% saw no need for shared high-tech building services such as data-processing or word-processing centers.
While the tenants’ indifference to fitness and child-care facilities may surprise some, those results match what BOMA leaders have heard in Los Angeles, said Geoff Ely, executive director for BOMA in L.A.
“Our informal anecdotal surveys suggest that people would rather have child-care facilities located near their homes than their offices,” Ely said. He said the same is true of convenience retail stores, which ranked low in importance in the formal BOMA survey.
Ely said one of the overriding conclusions from the survey is that “it confirmed a real need for the personal touch” in building management.
He said the survey also suggested that the demand for office space has not declined much as a result of trends such as telecommuting, the rise of home offices and “hoteling,” in which a number of workers share the same offices through a companywide reservation system.
“Despite hoteling and some of the other trends that are thought to be reducing individual space per person, well over 50% of those who were surveyed indicated they would be needing more space in the next year,” Ely said.
Gause said the survey results don’t necessarily mean that tenants don’t want fitness facilities, just that such facilities rank low on their list of priorities.
“Tenants tended to assign higher priorities to items that directly affect productivity and efficiency than those items that have a more indirect effect, like fitness and health-care facilities,” Gause said.
