Premium workspaces for growing businesses

Businesses can find conducive, future-proof workspaces in the newest office building to rise in one of the country’s fastest growing business hubs.

The Centrium—a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) pre-certified Gold structure—has opened its doors to its first batch of locators, providing a sustainable environment where businesses can still thrive amid and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Situated along Aseana Ave. in the Bay Area, this two-tower, premium grade office complex by Anchor Land Holdings offers exceptional green features such as curtain walls, double-glazed windows and heat-strengthened glass with low-emissivity coating. Its LEED pre-certification alone speaks volumes of Anchor Land’s staunch commitment to have all the necessary features in place to ensure a safe, healthy green space for its locators. Its well-equipped offices meanwhile are highly suitable to the new requirements of businesses, including IT and business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) firms, given the new health and safety protocols being imposed.

At the same time, Anchor Land’s first office development offers an enviable, strategic business address as its location, the Bay Area, holds a strong potential to capture spillover demand from other established business hubs such as the Makati central business district (CBD) and Fort Bonifacio, Colliers International Philippines earlier said.

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Bay Area (which straddles across the cities of Manila, Parañaque and Pasay) has already been attracting a huge number of tech and knowledge process outsourcing companies and traditional firms, owing to the availability of premium office spaces and its proximity to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and other CBDs.

The opening of the NAIA Expressway several years ago, Colliers had said, also played a crucial role in improving access to the Bay Area and was partly influential in raising its attractiveness as a business hub. This district essentially became another gateway in the South, attracting multinationals as well as local businesses from Metro Manila and nearby provinces like Cavite, Laguna and Batangas to set up an office in the Bay Area.

Based on the latest estimates by KMC Savills, the total leasable office stock in the Bay Area may reach 1.19 million sqm by 2023, including the existing stock and those in the pipeline. While vacancies here slightly grew to 3.7 percent of Grade A office stock in the second quarter this year, “this submarket is relatively unaffected by the pandemic,” KMC Savills added.

It bears noting, too, that outlook on the office property market, in fact, remains optimistic, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s COVID-19 Real Estate Developer Sentiment Survey, which was released this month. It noted that the office sector is seen to be one of the most resilient real estate segments amid this deadly COVID-19 pandemic, even exhibiting what it termed as “bouncebackability.”

“The office sub-sector is expected to regain its footing after the pandemic as outsourcing IT-BPM activities are expected to ramp up, with 44 percent of the respondents expect that the sub-sector will recover the fastest,” Cushman & Wakefield said.