When Tenants Say Creative Office, Brokers Hear Density
From Fortune 500 tenants to freelancers in co-working spaces, people expect some level of creative workspaces in their office. Whether they are thinking of flexible floor plans or increased amenities, the term means something different to brokers.
“People use these phrases like creative office. That means density to us,” Endeavor Real Estate Group principal Jonathan Tate said at Bisnow’s Austin Creative Office event Thursday.
Tate said Endeavor and many other brokers assume a need for at least seven people per 1K SF of office space, depending on the tenant.
With that increased density comes different needs. Solving for increased parking requirements is tough for concepts like Vuka Creative, Vuka founder and CEO Brian Schoenbaum said. Trying to solve parking issues early on can mitigate pain points later on, Schoenbaum said.
Offices that offer showers for bike commuters, ride-sharing pickup stations and Car2Go parking spots are more attractive to dense tenants, Tate said.
“It’s not sexy to talk about, but bathrooms are the hardest thing to solve,” Industrious national launcher Leah Alexander said.
Traditional office spaces are not built for the bathroom needs of co-working spaces, and mitigating those issues retroactively is almost always more troublesome, and more expensive.
“For first generation spaces, timing is critical,” DPR Construction senior project manager Adam Johnson said. “The earlier decisions are made, the less we scramble and make decisions on the fly.”
Johnson said sound masking is costly and cumbersome if it is not built into original plans. Now that industrial-style design is in vogue, finding ways to wire AV, HVAC and other tubes and systems in an aesthetically pleasing way should be figured out as quickly as possible.
“We used to have a bid-build model where many decisions were already made before construction came on board, but creative workplaces require more collaborative construction on the front end too,” Johnson said.
