COVID & the UK Office Sector: Initial Impacts and Emerging Trends

Howard Cooke, Nicola Livingstone, Pat McAllister, Stefania Fiorentino and Harris Rob

ERES from European Real Estate Society (ERES)

Abstract: This paper assesses the extent to which ‘20 years of change in 20 days’ purportedly produced by the COVID pandemic has affected and will continue to affect the occupation and use of office space. The pandemic has the potential to lead to some transformative impacts on the operating models and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the financial performance of many office occupiers. Many commentators consider that changes in business strategy and operating models in conjunction with an evolving, more challenging business environment will accelerate ongoing structural change. Such change is expected to have a range of varying impacts on both the level and pattern of demand for office space, the operation of office space and occupiers in office space in the short, medium and long terms. Drawing upon interviews with senior corporate real estate managers in global businesses, this paper reports on the initial findings of a research project exploring the experiences and responses of a range of major UK office occupiers to the crisis. To uncover and understand impacts and processes of change over time, the methodological approach consists of qualitative, longitudinal research. The research examines a range of issues including pre-pandemic workplace practices and strategies; the transition to home-working during the pandemic; perceptions of business performance during the pandemic and expectations regarding post-pandemic working patterns.

Keywords: COVID-19; Office Market; Operating models; Strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eres.architexturez.net/doc/oai-eres-id-eres2021-102 (text/html)
https://architexturez.net/system/files/P_20210603134319_8036.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2021_102

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERES from European Real Estate Society (ERES) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Architexturez Imprints ().