The future of the office is keeping both the Government Pension Investment Fund’s head of global real estate Hideto Yamada, and Ivanhoe Cambridge’s head of Europe and Asia Pacific Karim Habra, awake at night.
Yamada, speaking on a panel at INREV’s annual conference, said office buildings had always been at the top of GPIF’s real estate investment requirements “because of the scale, because of the track record, and we can have a long lease with a good credit tenant”.
However, he admitted that “this could be changed”. Yamada also said he was exploring how the home working trend and lower density requirements post-Covid might be offset over the next five to 10 years.
“There’s no way back to where we were,” Habra added. “But it’s also dependent on the young generation and how they want to work, and how they want to embrace office space in the future – and we’re not well positioned sometimes to comment on this. We need to listen to all the talents in a company.”
He added: “If we didn’t have any office exposure I would see this as a great opportunity, because you could really be grabbing the right opportunities and those that will perform the best.
“Like most international investors, office is our number one asset class and the key challenge is going to be how to adapt, how to transform your stock to meet the future trends and changes that we are going to see, and how to anticipate these changes early enough.”
For Udo Schaffer, vice president real estate at E.ON, also speaking on the panel, there is a still a future for the office post-Covid. “People are social and want to work together,” he said. He added that the pandemic had accelerated change, transforming the idea of the office as being somewhere where people worked into a place where people work together.
All three were speaking on a panel at INREV’s annual conference.
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