Corporations Pick Asia as Top Office Location

HONG KONG-Asian countries led as the top three most likely markets for new offices in a recent CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. survey of 280 of the world’s largest companies. In the survey, part of Los Angeles-based CBRE’s Business Footprints Report, Hong Kong led the list with 72 companies wishing to get into this market.

Most of the companies, almost 90%, are US-based firms. According to the data, Singapore was the second most wanted office location for the companies, at 66 companies, Beijing was third at 64 companies. The rest of the top 10 were Madrid (64), Tokyo (63), New York City (62), London (61), Shanghai (60), Moscow (59) and Milan (54).

This is the first time that CBRE has collected this data, so it’s difficult to make a historical comparison. However, Asieh Mansour, head of Americas Research for the firm, tells GlobeSt.com that the results were not a surprise.

“This underscores what we’ve been saying about the GDP growth and the balance of economic power eastward,” Mansour says. “Firms want to diversify their footprint, and they want to go into the fastest growing markets. Plus, there’s an available supply of labor, and there’s a growing middle class in the Asian countries.”

Sao Paolo, Brazil is another emerging market with an exploding middle class, but the city only ranked 18^th in the survey, with 50 of the 280 companies planning on opening offices there. Mansour says it’s likely that future surveys will show Brazil closer to the top. “Asia is just more of a transparent market, a lot of multinationals want to go there. Brazil and even northern Africa, will move up the charts,” she says.

Mansour admits that the recent stock market tumble may cause some of the firms to pull back somewhat on these new locations. The Dow Jones Industrial average was down more than 400 points by 2 p.m. today. She says that long-term, though, the companies will still likely make these moves.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, we’re trying to digest everything here at CBRE and what the implications are for the commercial real estate markets. For the short term, they may take a wait-and-see approach, but the long-term goal of diversification is not going away. It’s just too soon to tell for the near-term,” she says.