Around 60% of respondents to a survey of office tenants in Germany do not plan to reduce their office footprint as a result of Covid-19.
The survey, conducted in September by real estate consultancy Rueckerconsult, polled a total of 210 companies and was backed by ISG, HIH Real Estate and Polis Immobilien AG.
The findings reveal that only 13% of respondents intend to downsize their premises, while another 14% have not yet made up their minds. Just 8% of the survey respondents are planning to expand their floor space in order to ensure that minimum distances are observed.
Working from home has become an established part of Germany’s corporate culture in recent months, with only 14% of the respondents to the Rueckerconsult survey indicating they have not given their employees the option to work from home.
Shifting workplaces or desk-sharing remain more or less the exception in German office reality. The overwhelming majority of respondent tenants stated they do not use this form of office organisation.
Commenting on the findings, Ken Kuhnke, head of lettings and member of the senior management of HIH Real Estate, said: ‘While working from home is a wide-spread practice now, it will not lead to a general floor-space reduction among office occupiers. Rather, office employment will continue to increase. And working from home will actually accelerate the trend toward larger areas for interacting and collaborating…Tenants are well aware that the pandemic is going to end at some point and that the shortage of skilled labour will not have gone away by that time.’
‘Even in the modern work environment, there is no substitute for offices,’ said Mathias Gross, member of the board of Polis Immobilien AG. ‘They guarantee personal exchange, creativity and productivity at the workplace. While the home office will indeed play a role in future, it will quickly lose in significance once the coronavirus crisis is over.’
