Corporate executives and officers are encouraged to reflect on the role their in-house real estate teams play in supporting business operations and workforce productivity during Corporate Real Estate Week, March 15-19. CoreNet Global, the global association for corporate real estate professionals, has planned a slate of virtual seminars, presentations and networking events tied to five different daily themes, and will also be releasing new studies and relevant data throughout the week.
“The pandemic has forced a reckoning with remote and distributed work that corporate real estate professionals were well prepared for, and it will be up to our profession to chart the way forward after the crisis has ended,” says Angela Cain, CoreNet Global’s chief executive officer. “Corporate Real Estate Week will be both an acknowledgement of those contributions and an opportunity to think strategically about the return to the workplace.”
More than 11,000 CoreNet Global members in 50 countries have been grappling with COVID-19-triggered upheaval in corporate organizations’ space and facilities management needs over the past year. With key responsibilities for choosing sites, ensuring safe and healthy accommodations and overseeing building and technical support infrastructure, corporate real estate professionals have experienced a surge of new demands and pressures to facilitate remote work and ensure the well-being of staff within company facilities, as well as sudden shifting priorities for office locations.
Asked to reflect on these new circumstances in a survey CoreNet Global conducted last month, 88 per cent of respondents project that offices will now primarily accommodate team or collaborative tasks, while individual work moves off-site. Accordingly, they expect workers will spend less than half the work week in a traditional office setting with the remainder spent at home or occasionally at a co-working location. Thirty-six per cent foresee a 10 to 30 per cent cut in their organization’s real estate footprint within the next two years, while 16 per cent are looking for satellite hubs located closer to workers’ homes.
For this year, 58 per cent of survey respondents projected a return to 50 per cent office occupancy some time after June. Fewer than 9 per cent reported that their organizations would require workers to be vaccinated before they returned. However, more than three quarters indicated that workers would not be travelling internationally until at least later in the summer.
More than half of respondents affirm that more credence will be given to the host locale’s crisis readiness and potential vulnerabilities when choosing a site. The same number expect a retrenchment of employees from other global centres to their home countries.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
