GPE’s Courtauld on the draw of the office

This comment from GPE’s chief executive is in response to this week’s EG leader column and an earlier LinkedIn debate about working from home versus the office.Tania Jennings’ view that “no one wants to return to the office” is wrong. As ever, the truth is far more nuanced, never more so than when talking about the relative appeal of offices versus working from home. At GPE, we believe that flexible working policies are here to stay. Among our customer base, we know that hybrid working is now the norm; we know that their employees use their office space for connecting and collaborating in ways functionally impossible in the two-dimensional world of a computer screen. We also know that the demand for well-located, comfortable, efficient and demonstrably sustainable spaces is rising, not falling. Active demand for central London office space was up circa 67% in January 2024 compared to 12 months earlier, as organisations look to ensure their future by providing their most valuable asset, their people, with spaces for them to connect in, to create in and to enjoy. In our business, focused on top-quality buildings in central London’s core markets, particularly the West End, our spaces are pretty much full. We lease almost all of our refurbishments and redevelopments before we finish them and our rents are rising. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jennings’ view that waste in the building industry is shocking and that reuse and repurposing are the future. We are now reusing steel from our demolitions in our new buildings – we need to do the same with glass, concrete and other energy-hungry materials. Imagine a future in which new buildings are in fact reconstituted old buildings – we would no longer “mine” virgin materials to build but, instead, deconstruct and reconstruct “new” buildings to satisfy new customer needs, using “re-loved” materials. The holy grail of the commercial office development industry, it seems to me, is the blossoming of the growing number of exchange platforms into an eBay equivalent for building materials that allows a fully functioning market in re-use to emerge. That way, we satisfy the carbon demands highlighted by Jennings, of our increasingly discerning customers and their values-focused employees, and of our (rightly demanding) local planning authorities.