A guide to serviced offices and office space for rent in Kobe as well as general information that may be useful if you are considering renting office space in the city.

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History & Geography

The fifth-largest city in Japan is located on the southern end of Honshu Island, sitting between the coast and the mountains. Kobe is 19 miles west of Osaka, while to the east lies the city of Akashi. Kobe has long been an important port and during the Nara and Heian Periods lasting until the end of the 12^th century, was known as Owada Anchorage. During this time the city was an important port and the origin of many diplomatic missions to China. During the Kamakura Period, up to the mid-point of the 14^th century, the city’s port continued to grow in importance mostly off the back of trade with China. The acquired the name Hyogo Port during this time. However the city remained divided into different areas and suburbs during the Edo Period until the late 19^th century. The centre of what is now Kobe was controlled by the Tokugawa Shogunate, while the east was under the Amagasaki Domain and the west under the Akashi Domain. It wasn’t until 1871 that the city became one entity. The government of Bakufu opened up the port to foreign trade in 1868 just prior to the Meiji Restoration, the period of time which saw the Emperor of Japan restored to his former power and the Samurai abolished as a class. The city was named Kobe in 1889, a name derived from the name of those who worshipped at the famous Ikuta Shrine in the city. Kobe was heavily bombed during WWII, but the damage was completely repaired after the war. In 1995 however the city was devastated by an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter Scale. Prior to the earthquake Kobe’s port was the busiest in Japan, but it fell to fourth busiest due to damage to port facilities during the quake. It is currently the 49^th busiest container port in the world.

Economy

Kobe is one of the most economically dynamic cities in Japan. From its beginnings Kobe has always thrived on the trade that has come to the city through its advantageously located port. Today the port is the busiest container port in the entire region, surpassing even local rival Osaka. Ships from all over the world offload and take on products in Kobe and the port is a major contributor to the city’s economy. Kobe has a GDP of approximately 6.3 trillion Yen which accounts for about eight percent of the total economy of the Kansai region. Per capita income in the city stands at approximately 2.7 million Yen. Kobe has a large service sector which employs over 70 percent of the city’s workforce. Kobe is also a large manufacturing centre and exports about 2.5 billion Yen worth of goods every year. Among the main goods produced in Kobe are small appliances, transportation equipment and food products. Several major Japanese companies are headquartered in Kobe, among these are ASICS, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Electric, Kobe Steel, and TOA Corporation. Many international corporations have their far east headquarters in the city, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Tempur-Pedic.

Tourism & Culture

Kobe does not have the tourism industry that some of Japan’s other cities like Tokyo and Sapporo have, but it has a strong cultural identity and no lack of visitors from both inside Japan and the wider world. Kobe is perhaps best known for Kobe beef, the prized cuts considered a delicacy around the world. The beef is renowned for its succulent flavor and fatty, marbled texture. Kobe is also well-known in Japan for being a centre of fashion and design. The Japanese even have a saying, “if you can’t go to Paris, go to Kobe”. The biannual Kobe Fashion Week always attracts visitors from around Asia and the rest of the world. The city is also known to be a centre of jazz, and the festival Kobe Jazz Street is held every year to celebrate the genre. Kobe also has a glut of museums for culture vultures. The two most popular are undoubtedly the Kobe City Museum and the Kobe City Museum of Literature. One of the largest tourist attractions in the city is the Kitano quarter of the city. In this area there are a large number of foreign houses from the late Meiji era.

Transportation

Osaka International Airport is the largest airport in the area. However Kobe Airport is closer and sees almost as much traffic. Kobe Airport is located on an artificial island just off the coast and is accessible by train, shuttle, and car. The largest train station in Kobe is Sannomiya Station. The station serves as a transfer hub for three major distinct lines. The city is also served by the Kobe Electric Railway, which provides connections to the city of Sanda and Arima Onsen. Kobe also has a comprehensive bus network as well as an efficient taxi service.

Office space for rent in Kobe

Kobe is currently leading the way in Japan as far as vacancy rates are concerned. Recently vacancy rates in the city dropped by 1.5 percent and forecasters say they could continue to drop steadily. This leaves the city with a vacancy rate of 4.1 percent, the lowest in Japan. The country recently elected a new government who have instituted pro-inflation measures in a country that has been suffering from both falling wages and falling prices for years. Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is aiming to rehabilitate what is one of the world’s largest economies, but one that has been ailing in recent decades.

SCA, which sells a broad range of paper and other tree-based products, has agreed to take-up just short of 10,000 sq ft of office space at the Voyager office building at Manchester Airport. The move will see it leave behind its current offices in Greater Manchester, which are at the Lowry Plaza in Salford Quays.

Originally founded as a collective of Swedish foresting companies, SCA now sells products into more than 100 markets around the world, with its leading brands including the likes of Bodyform, Cushelle and Velvet.

A fit-out process is now set to start on behalf of Stockholm-based SCA at the Voyager office building, which incorporates a total of 71,0000 sq ft of commercial space and is owned by MAG Property, the real estate investment arm of the Manchester Airport Group.

“SCA has had a base in the North West for a number of years and recent expansion in our northern operation has meant we had to seek larger office premises,” explained Sally Barker, SCA’s vice president of consumer goods sales and marketing.

“A major consideration was to ensure it was easily accessible for current and potential employees both in the North West and further afield – being based at Manchester Airport, with its excellent transport facilities ensures that SCA remains ‘on the map’ as an employer of choice in the region.”

MAG Property is expected to announce very soon which parties have succeeding in winning a deal to construct the enormous mixed-use development scheme Airport City, which is set to see £650 million of investment into the areas around Manchester Airport.

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Offices in Paris and in Monaco along the Cote d’Azur have been established by the company after careful planning and consideration. The two bases add to its first office in France, which opened in Nice in 2006.

France and Spain are both countries in which GallowGlass has managed to increase its revenues in recent years, with the company’s staff setting up stages and facilities at some of southern Europe’s largest outdoor festivals.

The British firm’s opening of an office in Paris marks the culmination of four years of work and apparently an important step forward for the business.

Conferencing News reported on the office openings and quotes GallowGlass’ managing director as saying: “The fact that we undertake jobs right across mainland Europe, and consistently in France and Spain made it essential to have local bases, and we opened in Barcelona and Nice at the same time.”

“We’ve got to grips with the French tax system, labour laws and workforce costs and have achieved co-operative liaison with the French authorities and suppliers,” added Trent Sprules, who looks after the Parisian and the Monaco operations. “The fact that most of our workforce are bilingual gives both UK and French clients added confidence, and with several years’ operation in France under our belts already we are entirely familiar with all of the key venues,” he said.

GallowGlass also has offices in the Manchester, Nottingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Bristol and Birmingham.

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Skanska, which was responsible for building the now iconic ‘Gherkin’ tower at 30 St Mary Axe, acquired the land between 11 and 19 Monument Street with a view to future development last year. It now has the relevant planning permissions to deliver 85,000 sq ft of Grade A offices in the heart of central London, as well as around 3,000 sq ft of retail space.

Monument Street takes its name from the enormous Monument column, which stands at one end of the road there and is a historic landmark for the City of London erected in the 17^th century to commemorate the Great Fire of London that devastated much of the city in 1666.

Plans for Skanska’s office and retail building were drawn up by Ken Shuttleworth and his Make Architects firm. The Scandinavia-based multi-national construction company behind it has said that it will itself occupy 40,000 sq ft of the available office space at the City of London site once completed.

There is currently a building stood between 11 and 19 Monument Street but Skanska’s plans for the site include provisions for its demolition.

The City of London has a number of large-scale office building projects at various stages of development right now including those being generally referred to as the Walkie-Talkie and Cheesegrater towers but official known as 20 Fenchurch Street and 122 Leadenhall Street respectively. One of the latest to have been given the go-ahead is the so-called Scalpel, which will eventually become the European headquarters of the American insurance giant WR Berkley.

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CBRE is among the largest businesses of its kind in the UK and has operations around the world. Its Liverpool commitment relates to offices on the sixth floor of a recently completed building at 4 St Paul’s Square in the city centre.

The development of 4 St Paul’s was delivered through the English Cities Fund, a joint venture comprised of Muse Developments, Legal & General Property and the Homes & Communities Agency.

CBRE will join the likes of Santander Corporate in occupying office space at the site, with the international banking group having recently agreed to lease 14,155 sq ft within the building.

“We are delighted that CBRE has chosen No. 4 St Paul’s Square as its new Liverpool home,” said Phil Layall, development director of the English Cities Fund. “This is an example of yet another private sector occupier choosing to locate within St Paul’s Square, Liverpool’s premier commercial business district.”

“No. 4 St Paul’s Square is an impressive building and, after considering the various alternatives, we regard it as being the building that best reflects the contemporary and forward-thinking nature of our company,” said CBRE director Mark Worthington.

The English Cities Fund’s St Paul’s project was named as the UK’s best office space development at the Property Awards of 2012. The scheme saw the investment of around £34 million and was the first speculatively constructed building of its kind on Merseyside to be given a BREEAM Excellent rating for its sustainability credentials.

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Not to be confused with Vancouver in Canada, Vancouver in Washington State forms part of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area, despite the fact that those two neighbouring cities lie technically in different states.

Integra’s plan is to consolidate its Portland-area workforce from multiple locations to a single site at 18110 SE 34^th Street in Vancouver, where it has now signed a lease to occupy open and accessible office space on a substantial scale.

The terms of the deal mean Integra will see out its existing leases on office space in Vancouver and Portland before moving staff to its new regional base from June 2014. “Significant investment” has been allocated to cover the costs of improvement work aimed at bringing the new offices up to scratch and tailoring them to the needs of the telecoms company.

“With this facility, we’ll be able to maximize our efficiency and enhance our communication by housing most of our key, centralized functions under one roof in a dynamic, sophisticated commercial space,” said Integra’s chief financial officer Jesse Selnick in a statement.

“Our people were a critical factor in our selection process. Roughly half of our employees in the Portland Metro area currently reside in Washington,” explained Felicity O’Herron, Integra’s senior vice president of human resources.

Integra provides communications and networking services to businesses in as many as 35 different cities in the western states of the USA. The company has said it intends to maintain some operating bases in the state of Oregon but outside of Portland even after its local office consolidation efforts are complete, specifically in the cities of Salem, Eugene, Bend and Lake Oswego.

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The Greater Manchester Pension Fund, the property development group Argent and the construction and support services giant Carillion are the front runners to be assigned the task of creating ‘Airport City’, the Manchester Evening News reports.

Other parties are still battling it out with the apparent favourites for the contract but it is believed that the Manchester Airport Group (MAG) has all-but made its decision on the matter.

The Airport City scheme looks set to become one of the most expansive the North-West of England has ever seen, with planning permission already granted for the creation of 1.5 million sq ft of office space, as well as for large scale retail, leisure, hotel, logistics and manufacturing facilities.

A spokesperson for MAG said in a statement: “No party has yet been selected for the final stage in our joint venture partner selection process.

“We are pleased with the level of interest shown to date by a number of parties in relation to the Airport City Project at Manchester Airport; as a number of bids have come from a range of international developers and funders.”

In addition to Manchester Airport, MAG owns and operates London Stansted, and both the East Midlands and Bournemouth airports elsewhere in the UK. The MAG Developments part of the business is leading the Airport City project, which is a government-backed Enterprise Zone development.

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Bosses of both companies are expecting their £200 million mixed-use regeneration effort to provide a significant boost to the Edinburgh economy and particularly to the Haymarket area of the Scottish capital.

As well as an amount of new and high quality office space, plans for the redevelopment effort include the creation of a sizable number of new retail and residential properties. A second phase of the scheme is already being discussed with a further 700,000 sq ft of office and retail space potentially to be added once the first phase of development is complete.

Adrian Ringrose, chief executive of Interserve, said in a statement that Haymarket represents one of the best city centre development locations in the UK. Several thousand new jobs are expected to result from the investment and the project over the course of the next few years.

Simon Fox, Tiger’s development director, said that the two joint venture partners are confident of delivering what Haymarket and central Edinburgh needs.

“Throughout the planning process we have worked hard to develop our proposals in-line with the needs of the city and the local community” he said.

“We are now looking forward to working closely with our development partners Interserve to finally give the Haymarket area the high quality of mixed-use development which it so richly deserves, providing a critical balance to the overall development of Edinburgh’s city centre.”

In other Scottish office space news, Miller Developments recently announced that it is planning to initiate the building of a £400 million business part close to Aberdeen Airport as part of a scheme expected to create as many as 8,000 new jobs.

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A guide to serviced offices and office space for rent in Guangzhou as well as general information that may be useful if you are considering renting office space in the city.

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History & Geography

Guangzhou is the largest city in southern China and one of the most economically dynamic cities in the world. Formerly known as Canton, the city is located in the south of Guangdong province on the Pearl River Delta next to Baiyun Mountain. To the front of the city lies the South China Sea and to the back mountainous terrain. Guangzhou, then referred to as Panyu, became a provincial capital in 111 BC when it was annexed by the Han Dynasty. By the year 226 AD Panyu was the seat of the Guangzhou Prefecture, and eventually the city was simply referred to by this name. The city became an important port during the 8^th century, engaging in trade with Arab merchants. Guangzhou also had a thriving ship-building industry during this time. The first Europeans to arrive in the city were Portuguese merchants in 1514. In the subsequent centuries more European traders arrived and soon started referring to the port as ‘Canton’, resulting from their confused pronunciation of Guangdong. Before long the port was the busiest trading port in China with ships from all over Europe plying their trade their. The British captured the port during the First Opium War in 1839. Soon after however they ceded it to China and colonized Hong Kong to use as their trading base. In 1938 Japanese troops occupied Guangzhou, not being expelled until the end of WWII in 1945. During the Chinese Civil War Guangzhou was occupied by Nationalist forces until 1949 when Communist forces relieved the city. In the 1970s Guangzhou was the focus of major infrastructure and housing development. Later many factories moved to the area as manufacturing grew more expensive in Hong Kong. Today the city is a manufacturing and commercial hub with a population of almost 13 million people.

Economy

Currently Guangzhou is the largest manufacturing hub in China with a GDP of USD 133.5 billion. The city is one of the most densely urbanized regions on earth and is a major driver of the country’s economy. In 1984 the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone was established. Consisting of 17 square kilometers, the zone contains six major industries, electric machinery, foodstuffs, metallurgy and metal fabricating, chemical materials and electronic equipment. In 1992 the Guangzhou Free Trade Zone was established and many major industries moved to the zone, including computer software, logistics and international trade. The latest zone to be established was the Guangzhou Nansha Export Processing Zone. Founded in 2005, the zone was designed to boost the industries of biotechnology, heavy industry and car manufacturing. Guangzhou also hosts the China Import and Export Fair every year. The fair is a major event which brings visitors from around the globe. It is hosted by the Ministry of Trading and takes place in the city’s cavernous Pazhou Complex. The city is also known as a retail hub and visitors come from all over China to explore its many shopping malls and complexes. Among the largest are the China Plaza and Liwan Plaza, which both have thousands of shops between them.

Culture & Tourism

Guangzhou does not have the thriving tourism industry that the cities of Beijing and Shanghai do. However as the largest city in southern China, Guangzhou does see thousands of visitors every year. For those that do come to the city there is no shortage of things to do and see. Among the attractions in Guangzhou is Shamian Island, site of the old British and French concessions. The island features a variety of old houses and public buildings, tree-lined avenues and idyllic cafes. Many visitors also go to the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees, an old Buddhist temple built in the sixth century. Another major architectural site is the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, honoring the old Nationalist leader. A statue of Sun Yat-Sen adorns the entrance to the hall. For those in search of more modern architecture, the Canton Tower, built in 2009, is the tallest building in China and the fourth-tallest in the world. Tourists can go to the observation deck, which is the highest in the world, for one of the best views of Guangzhou. Guangzhou is known for its pleasant climate which sees hot summers and cool winters where the temperature seldom drops below ten degrees Celsius.

Transportation

Guangzhou is served by the Baiyun International Airport. The airport is very new, only being finished in 2004, and is already the second-busiest in China. The city has four major train stations, Guangzhou Station, Guangzhou East, Guangzhou North, and Guangzhou South. It is very easy to get to Hong Kong from Guangzhou, either by train, ferry or bus. The city itself has a comprehensive bus system used by many residents, as well as a metro and taxi services. Motorcycles are banned in Guangzhou.

Office space for rent in Guangzhou

Guangzhou’s economy has been in the doldrums recently with industrial profits falling sharply and growth also tapering off. The rental of Grade A office space has dropped mainly due to foreign firms trying to tighten their belts. No new supply has entered the market recently and existing supply has very gradually been eaten up, resulting in a vacancy rate of approximately 12 percent. The average rental price for Grade A office space in the city is currently standing at about RMB 225 per square metre per month, a significant rise on the 2011 price of RMB 200 per square metre per month.

The two parties have come together with the aim of seeing a building called ‘Landmark’ turned into 13-storeys and several hundred thousand square feet of high quality office space available to rent.

Landmark sits on the site of what was until a decade or so ago an Odeon cinema complex in Manchester city centre and it is adjacent to St Peter’s Square, much of which is currently being redeveloped.

Planning permission for the turning Landmark into available office space has already been granted, although there are no concrete plans as yet for development work to get underway on a speculative basis. Nonetheless, Hines has made clear its intention to commit to the project and its satisfaction at having agreed the terms of a joint venture with Manchester & Manchester Metropolitan Properties.

“We have been looking at opportunities in Manchester for some time and are delighted to have finally secured such a prime city centre site,” explained Hines director Anthony Leonard.

“Availability of quality office space will become scarce and, with few new buildings under construction, we believe there is a tremendous opportunity in Manchester to deliver new Class A space.”

Hines UK has commercial property development projects either ongoing or in the pipeline with an overall value estimated to be in excess of £750 million, including several in central London and two in Birmingham.

The property analyst firm GVA recently released a report suggesting that Manchester and other cities across the UK might soon be faced with an acute shortage of grade A office space to rent unless action is taken to increase supplies.

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