Office rents soar around the world

A new Global Market Rents Survey from CB Richard Ellis reveals that the cost of occupying office space is growing strongly around the world.

In the past 12 months, 87% of the 170 office markets monitored – including all of the major NZ and Australian CBDs – have recorded positive growth in occupancy costs.

However, CBRE research director Zoltan Moricz said NZ was being outpaced by its global counterparts.

“The local perception is that prime office rental increases have been very rapid in NZ over the past year, with a 9-10% growth rate,” Moricz says.

“However, the GMR survey shows that the global office market has been very strong and from this perspective, NZ’s performance is relatively weak. Wellington’s growth came in at 69th out of the 170 cities surveyed, while Auckland is 74th and Christchurch is 127th,” Moricz says.

“Of the cities surveyed, 32 experienced rental growth of over 20% in the past year,” he says.

This placed NZ in a competitive position, with the major centres of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch offering increasingly better value and relatively cheap rentals.

Christchurch has the fourth cheapest occupancy costs of all the markets surveyed by CBRE, behind Jakarta in Indonesia, Columbus in the US and Asuncion in Paraguay.

The survey tracks the world’s most expensive markets as well as markets with the fastest growing occupancy costs.