Fortunes for the best office real estate and the rest are quickly diverging. Once upon a time, that would have offered a tried-and-tested play for investors: Buy tired assets, bring them up to scratch and sell them on again. But today, it’s not so simple. The supply chain crisis coupled with the climate emergency are having an impact on the process of making offices fit for the future. “Prime will still do well, but everything else will suffer,” Hines Senior Managing Director and Head of UK Ross Blair told attendees at Bisnow’s London State of the Market event, held at the Oval cricket ground in Vauxhall. “Build costs are really hard to control right now. If you want to refurbish or build better offices, that makes it very difficult.” 
A combination of factors, including labour shortages and a post-Covid surge in demand, has caused construction costs to spike across the globe. In August, UK building materials were 23% higher than one year earlier, data from the UK government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy showed. That is holding back…  Read the full story here. | 
