How do Quality of Life and Sustainability Drive Office Leasing?

Every year, millions of real estate decisions are made, from the transaction of large assets to office and apartment leasing, home buying, and short-term rentals. To mitigate risk, optimize returns and assess these opportunities at scale, the industry is increasingly embracing data.

Accelerating trends

Analyzing data and implementing technology is not entirely new for the commercial real estate industry. However, like so many trends that were present prior to the pandemic, including workplace flexibility and population migration, these efforts have significantly accelerated in recent months and altered the way that location decisions are made today.

Office tenants are including CHROs, in addition to the typical C-suite participants’ on-site selection teams, expanding the criteria for their search beyond the cost of space and availability of labor to cultural fit and more strategic corporate outcomes that can be supported by the right office location.

Companies are demanding data to drive these critical decisions and not relying solely on the opinion of the local broker or economic development organization to understand what submarkets will allow them to attract and retain the best talent. In office leasing, choosing the wrong location can also mean risking a company’s brand, business continuity – and ultimately – its bottom line.

Data as an ESG imperative

The stakes are too high to rely on anything but data as a basis for leasing in a certain location, not only financially, but environmentally and socially. These decisions cumulatively dictate the sustainability of our cities and the quality of life of our communities, ESG criteria that talent and customers are increasingly using to vote with their feet and push corporations to consider.

The definition of what makes a place desirable varies broadly from case to case.

Quality of life is conceptually subjective and traditionally something that we intuitively feel or experience when we visit a place. Sustainability has become a catchall for greenwashing in commercial real estate and more broadly. These kinds of office site analyses require hard data that describes and quantifies everything outside the four walls of the asset objectively.

From intuition to certainty

Local Logic’s location insights allow our users to remove personal opinion and truly compare multiple locations across uniform, data-driven characteristics like access to multiple modes of transportation available for commuting, proximity to amenities like restaurants, coffee shops, and parks to meet with colleagues and clients, and the more subjective experience of a neighborhood that attracts workers back to the office with the area’s vibrancy and support of their wellness goals.

Surveys and comps become richer and more empowering to clients leasing space when combined with an objective comparison and context of location.

To learn more about Local Logic’s Location Scores, download a sample one-click report or get in touch with our team.