Canberra has one of the lowest office vacancy rates in the country, but yet the office market has felt the impact of hybrid workplaces.
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00:00 As companies become hybrid workplaces and employees enjoy the advantages of working from home,
00:06 what has this move meant for offices in the ACT?
00:10 Latest data shows that Canberra has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country.
00:15 This means there are lesser offices available for lease in the ACT.
00:19 But will this change in the future as businesses try to lease smaller office spaces due to employees working from home?
00:27 Property leaders say that this will depend on how old the office space is and where it's located.
00:33 It's certainly varied depending on which part of Canberra you're in.
00:37 There's demand in certain town centres where there's a lot of tenants wanting to be, like the Barton area and the city.
00:43 Other areas like the town centres, Belconnen where we are now, and Tuggerong, there's a less number of tenants,
00:49 so therefore those markets are more affected about demand and supply and which tenants will move in there.
00:54 This building behind us obviously was built 10 years ago for the Australian Communications Authority.
00:59 Over the last 10 years they've shrunk up a bit, they don't need as much space and they're moving into a smaller premises.
01:05 So now we have this building for lease and the challenge will be not that it's a great quality building,
01:10 because it is a great quality building, it's finding tenants that want this amount of space in Belconnen over the next two to three years.
01:16 We've really felt that post-COVID the spaces that you build and how that relates to your organisation are really, really critical.
01:23 We want to do really nice spaces where people can get together, collaborate, work together,
01:27 and people will come to the office because those that value culture and those that value their staff have such an office space to provide for their staff.
01:34 So we think this building we're going to build is really going to allow for that new way of working,
01:38 as well as have a very strong sustainability agenda which is getting more and more important for occupiers and their staff.
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