Power Reads: 5 Interesting Articles That Will Help You This Week

Each week, I select a few articles that rise above the fray and hopefully help you on your journey in leadership and the CRE world. They pull from one of four "corners": corporate real estate, technology, management science and anything positive. Each day we can become a better version of ourselves.

1. UPDATE: Microsoft plans to expand in Atlanta, turn city into major hub

Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company plans to make metro Atlanta a major hub as it embarks on a significant expansion.

The tech giant is adding two regional data centers and could bring thousands of jobs to 90 acres of land it bought in recent months at the stalled Quarry Yards development on the city’s Westside.

“You don’t buy 90 acres if you don’t have plans to grow substantially,” Smith told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview.

He declined to provide specific details or a timetable for Quarry Yards, one of the largest undeveloped tracts of greenspace near the city center, beyond saying it would set aside a quarter of the development for affordable housing before building any offices.

2. Big Tech Appears To Be Playing the Long Game on Office Space

Despite large tech firms being among the first to send employees out of the office to work from home early in the pandemic, and then announcing several extensions of that policy, it appears the long-term plans for many of the top firms do include a return to the office.

Many of these same household Big Tech names were among those signing large office leases over 100,000 square feet during 2020.

As the pandemic accelerated in the U.S. in March, Facebook's CEO rocked the commercial real estate sector when he said, “I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range — I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.”

Three months later, Facebook signed a 15-year lease for 740,000 square feet of office space in New York, pushing its total office footprint in the city to more than 2 million square feet.

3. Flexspace to Grow Amid Post-Pandemic Drop in Office Demand

Companies will likely continue to offer their employees greater choice in where they work as 2021, and flexspace will be a part of their offerings, according to a Colliers International report.

This will give a boost to this office format, however much of the growth will occur outside the list of usual CBD suspects, as some markets are already feeling the supply pinch from a lack of flex workspaces outside of downtown locations.

“As occupiers continue to seek a range of geographic locations to solve for a distributed workforce there is a substantial deficit of supply in suburban areas, secondary cities, commuter towns and emerging markets,” the Colliers report states. “2021 will be the year that non-CBD flexible workspace supply increases dramatically.

4. Coworking Companies Like WeWork, Industrious Pivot to Thrive Beyond COVID

Times look grim for the coworking market.

Despite coronavirus vaccines slowly rolling out, offices and coworking locations around the country still remain largely empty as workers stay home and major employers, including Salesforce and Twitter, announce permanent remote work options for staffers.

WeWork has ditched locations around the country and Regus has done the same by putting entities tied to outposts into bankruptcy. Flex office provider Knotel filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, a little more than a year after it was crowned a unicorn, to be acquired by Newmark, while Breather shuttered all of its locations to switch to an online-only platform. Breather CEO Bryan Murphy told The Globe and Mail that, “Breather, in its current form as an operator, doesn’t make sense, and, to be frank, I’m not sure it ever made sense.”

5. WFH Is Corroding Our Trust in Each Other

About a third of the employees of a regional bank have returned to working onsite, and the president holds a weekly all-staff town hall meeting by videoconference. Employees are encouraged to submit anonymous questions for him or other senior leaders to answer.

For the past six weeks, an increasing number of people have asked, “How do we know if the people who are still working from home are actually working?” Some employees have even suggested specific technology-based monitoring approaches to track remote workers’ onscreen time and activities.

Each week, the president assures his employees that the business is on track and that measures of productivity (like the number of loans taken out) are above expectations. “But it’s exasperating,” he said. “No matter how much I try to convince them or even use numbers and other kinds of evidence, it’s not sinking in. You’d think that if I can trust people, surely they can trust each other, right? But no.”

Your success blesses others. I wish you a great a hugely impactful week!

Ken Ashley