How working from home has affected the office market in Canberra
Canberra has one of the lowest office vacancy rates in the country, but yet the office market has felt the impact of hybrid workplaces.
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00:00 As companies become hybrid workplaces and employees enjoy the advantages of working from home,
00:06 what has this move meant for offices in the ACT?
00:10 Latest data shows that Canberra has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country.
00:15 This means there are lesser offices available for lease in the ACT.
00:19 But will this change in the future as businesses try to lease smaller office spaces due to employees working from home?
00:27 Property leaders say that this will depend on how old the office space is and where it's located.
00:33 It's certainly varied depending on which part of Canberra you're in.
00:37 There's demand in certain town centres where there's a lot of tenants wanting to be, like the Barton area and the city.
00:43 Other areas like the town centres, Belconnen where we are now, and Tuggerong, there's a less number of tenants,
00:49 so therefore those markets are more affected about demand and supply and which tenants will move in there.
00:54 This building behind us obviously was built 10 years ago for the Australian Communications Authority.
00:59 Over the last 10 years they've shrunk up a bit, they don't need as much space and they're moving into a smaller premises.
01:05 So now we have this building for lease and the challenge will be not that it's a great quality building,
01:10 because it is a great quality building, it's finding tenants that want this amount of space in Belconnen over the next two to three years.
01:16 We've really felt that post-COVID the spaces that you build and how that relates to your organisation are really, really critical.
01:23 We want to do really nice spaces where people can get together, collaborate, work together,
01:27 and people will come to the office because those that value culture and those that value their staff have such an office space to provide for their staff.
01:34 So we think this building we're going to build is really going to allow for that new way of working,
01:38 as well as have a very strong sustainability agenda which is getting more and more important for occupiers and their staff.
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