Vacancies are at an all-time high while workers in the financial industry and other sectors maintain there is no way they are coming back, at least not full-time.
We at finews.asia have been going on about all this for almost three years now.
In the middle of 2021, we wrote that if permanent remote work was the reality of the post-pandemic future, then built-up Asian cities full of expensive skyscrapers and little room for suburbs potentially made the region wholly unsuitable for accelerated growth rates.
Don’t Follow the MTR
Then, a year ago, we again argued that we could be seeing an inflection point, and that many might be starting to question the typical Asia-based model of high-rise offices and apartments linked up to mass transit stations and malls.
A «Bloomberg» report about a year back also maintained that Hong Kong’s office towers had never been as empty as they were, with renowned billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s Cheung Kong building in Central being a quarter vacant.
Nothing Changed
The news and information service was likely to be in the know given its offices are located in that very building. Moreover, they maintained that another new building being put up by him just across the street had exactly one tenant.
Now «Bloomberg» (paywall) is back with an update – and it doesn’t look like much, if anything, has changed.
Hidden Forces
Cheung Kong is still a quarter vacant, and the nearby, newer tower has only leased 10 percent of its space. Anecdotally, there are just fewer people lolling about the financial district during the day. The cafes seem largely empty most mornings and the restaurants are rarely filled to the brim at lunch.
But don’t just take my word for it. A cursory generic Google search (collated) shows «The Straits Times» reporting on the city’s empty office towers in June 2023, while Asian real estate intelligence service Mingtiandidiscussed falling rents.
The Almost Great Resignation
However, there is an interesting wrinkle this year. A survey by HR consultant Randstad published on Mondaysaid that slightly over half of employees would «consider quitting» if their employers asked them to spend more time working in the office.
According to them, about 70 percent of city workers are required to be in the office full-time while 46 percent have made changes to their lives on the assumption that hybrid work would continue after the pandemic. Lest we forget, the last measures related to that were only rescinded early last year in the city.
Baby Boomers Lead on Flexibility
Randstad also indicated that 43 percent of the survey respondents would reject job opportunities if they were not seen as flexible enough.
They also took pains to indicate that there were clear differences in generations here. Millennials thought salary was a more important consideration while a «staggering» 60 percent of baby boomers would only consider jobs with flexible work arrangements.
Societal Forces
So, everyone at this point should give us our big I-told-you-so. Larger, hidden societal forces are likely to be at play here, changing the way we work and live in Asia.
As we said last time, only time will tell where all this will lead.
