Outsourcing Likely to Slow
Rebound in Office Properties
Will outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas throw a monkey wrench into a U.S. commercial real-estate recovery?
It's a question that's sparking heated debate. But one thing is clear: Outsourcing will slow growth in demand for commercial office space, meaning the industry won't rebound as quickly as many hoped.
Big companies -- from Intel Corp. to Motorola Inc. to International Business Machines Corp. -- have been moving jobs abroad, and the trend is expected to continue. The moves, coupled with still-high national office vacancy rates, have kept outsourcing a hot topic at numerous real-estate conferences and the subject of a flurry of research papers.
Research firm Reis Inc. expects absorption of space to fall 26% from its peak to an average 68.7 million square feet over the next three years, due partly to outsourcing.
Dire Predictions
Last month, Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., technology research firm, revised upward its previous forecast for the number of white-collar jobs that would be shifted offshore by 2015 to 3.4 million from 3.3 million.
TAKING SPACE
See a chart showing absorption of office space in the U.S. from 1996 to 2003, and estimates through 2008.
Around the same time, a survey by Chicago-based real-estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. showed that 80% of real-estate executives for major companies said they were likely to increase their offshore call centers and computer services over the next five years. Two-thirds said they were likely to increase offshore back-office functions.
"There's a clear impact on the real-estate sector from the offshoring trend," says Dale Anne Reiss, global director of real estate at Ernst & Young LLP in New York. Using Forrester's earlier forecast, Ms. Reiss had calculated that demand for about 50 million square feet of office space a year will be lost as jobs move overseas. "We've already seen office demand equivalent to the central business district of Tampa move overseas," she says, "and at a faster rate than previously anticipated."
In a report in March that provoked much discussion, M. Leanne Lachman, president of Lachman Associates LLC, a real-estate consulting firm, and scholar at Columbia University's Columbia Business School in New York, predicted outsourcing of jobs will result in 500 million square feet of lost demand over the next 12 years, about 17% of the total nationwide office market. "We will keep the current very high vacancy rates" because of offshoring, says Ms. Lachman. "Rents will not go up. Tenant concessions will not go down. And it means overall property values will go down."
A report last fall by Ashok D. Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, reached similar, though more dire conclusions. It put the upside of square footage lost at 800 million feet over 10 years.
But new research from LaSalle Investment Management, a unit of Jones Lang LaSalle, and PricewaterhouseCoopers of New York concludes that such forecasts are overly pessimistic. Both point out that what's being lost in the discussion of outsourcing jobs is the insourcing of jobs to the U.S., with foreign companies hiring employees in the U.S.
"Insourcing provides substantial office demand in the U.S.," says Steven Laposa, director of global strategic real-estate research at PricewaterhouseCoopers, citing statistics from the Organization for International Investment. Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey rank among the top states for insourcing, according to the organization, a Washington, D.C., business association representing the U.S. subsidiaries of international companies, which keeps track of the number of jobs being sent to the U.S.
Certain markets are expected to be protected from loss of jobs overseas. The effects aren't expected to be felt much in metropolitan markets, for instance. And government centers like Washington or Sacramento shouldn't see big losses since outsourcing is politically unsavory.
Suburban Plight
However, suburban, secondary and tertiary markets that serve the call-center and data-processing industries are widely expected to be hardest hit.
"From a real-estate perspective, it's for sure not positive news for suburban [office] buildings so I think at the very low end of the office market, [outsourcing] certainly will reduce demand," says Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Office Properties Trust, the nation's largest office landlord. "Since these types of jobs tended to be outsourced to rural areas, the near-term impact on 24-hour urban cities will be zero."
Bill Maher, director of North American research and strategy at LaSalle Investment Management, says cities such as Tampa, Jacksonville, Fla., and Tucson, Ariz. -- areas known for having a large call-center concentration -- could see short-term employment and real-estate problems until new businesses create jobs for laid-off employees. But, he says, many of the major call-center locations are in high-growth areas that tend to create numerous jobs. "Overall growth in these high-growth cities should keep employment and office demand at relatively high levels," he says.
Nevertheless, some building owners are still fearing the worst. "What fills office space is jobs," says John P. Kelly, chairman of Building Owners and Managers International, a Washington D.C., trade group representing building owners and managers. "And if jobs get outsourced overseas, until there is a replacement job here, we're likely to have empty space."
What's more, he says, there is a fair amount of shadow office space, extra room a tenant isn't using but isn't putting on the market for sublease. Shadow space currently is estimated to total about 4% of office space nationwide. "The likelihood of tenants renewing the lease on that space is very slim," says Mr. Kelly.
外包或延缓美国写字楼市场复苏
美国的工作岗位外包到海外是否会打击美国商业地产市场的复苏？
这是一个正引起热烈讨论的问题。但有一点是清楚的：外包将放缓市场对商业写字楼的需求，这意味著该行业不会像很多人希望的那样迅速反弹。
从英特尔公司(Intel Corp.)到摩托罗拉公司(Motorola Inc.)，再到国际商业机器公司(International Business Machines Corp.)，这些大公司都在将部分工作外包到海外，这股潮流还将继续下去。再加上美国依然居高不下的写字楼空置率，海外外包活动已成为很多房地产会议的热门主题以及一系列研究报告的主题。
研究公司Reis Inc.预计未来三年写字楼空间吸收量将从顶峰时期的平均6,870万平方英尺减少26%，其中部分原因就是外包。
上月，科技研究公司Forrester Research Inc.将它此前对2015年之前白领工作外包海外的预期从330万个上调至了340万。
与此同时，芝加哥的房地产服务公司Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.进行的一项调查显示，80%的供职于大公司的房地产管理人士表示，未来5年他们可能增加海外呼叫中心和电脑服务。三分之二的人表示，他们可能增加海外后勤职能。
“房地产业很明显地受到了海外外包趋势的冲击，”纽约安永会计师事务所(Ernst & Young LLP)全球地产总监达勒?安妮?雷斯(Dale Anne Reiss)说。依据Forrester之前的预测，雷斯计算出每年5,000万平方英尺的写字楼需求将因工作外包海外而消失。“我们已看到相当于坦帕(Tampa)中央商务区这么大的写字楼需求因海外而消失，”她说，“而且需求减少的速度比之前预期的还要快。”
房地产咨询公司Lachman Associates LLC的总裁、哥伦比亚大学的哥伦比亚商学院(Columbia University's Columbia Business School)学者拉克曼(M. Leanne Lachman)3月份发表的一份报告引起了广泛讨论，他预计未来12年因工作外包将减少5亿平方英尺的需求，这大约是全美写字楼市场的17%。因为外包，“目前的高空置率将持续下去，”拉克曼说。“租金不会增加，租户的租赁面积不会减少。这意味著整个地产市场的价值将下降。”
加州大学伯克利分校的费舍尔房地产和城市经济学中心(Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley)的巴德汉(Ashok D. Bardhan)和克洛(Cynthia Kroll)去年秋季发表了一份报告，得出虽然更大胆，但很类似的结论。该报告预计，未来10年写字楼的需求将减少8亿平方英尺。
但Jones Lang LaSalle旗下的LaSalle Investment Management和普华永道会计师事务所(PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC)的一项新研究得出的结论是，这些预测过于悲观了。这两家公司指出，所有有关工作外包的争议中没有看到外国公司在美国本地创造的就业机会。
“内包提供了巨大的美国写字楼市场需求，”普华永道全球战略房地产研究主管拉珀索(Steven Laposa)援引国际投资组织(Organization for International Investment)的统计说。根据总部在美国首都华盛顿的组织称，俄亥俄州、乔治亚州、密歇根州、宾夕法尼亚州和新泽西州是内包受益最大的州。该组织代表的是国际公司在美国的子公司，它跟踪记录了转移到美国的工作数量。
某些市场可能不会受工作海外外包的影响。如城市地区的市场就可能感觉不到这一影响。政府中心城市如华盛顿或萨格拉门托就不会有很大损失，因为外包在政治上是不受欢迎的。
但作为呼叫中心和数据处理中心的郊区、二级和三级房地产市场广泛估计将遭受最严重打击。
“从房地产市场的角度看，对于郊区的写字楼来说，这肯定不是什么好消息，因此我认为在低端写字楼市场，（外包）肯定会减少需求，”美国最大的写字楼租赁公司Equity Office Properties Trust的董事长则尔(Sam Zell)说，“由于这类工作倾向于外包到边远地区，因此这对24小时运营的城市写字楼的短期影响是零。”
LaSalle Investment Management北美研究和战略主管马赫(Bill Maher)说，像佛罗里达的坦帕、杰克逊维尔以及亚利桑那州的图克森这些城市可能会碰到短期的就业和房地产市场萧条的问题，直到新的业务为失业的人带来新的工作机会。上述地区因集中了大型呼叫中心而闻名。但他表示，很多这些主要的呼叫中心所在地是往往能制造出大量就业机会的高增长地区。“这三大高增长城市的整体增长速度应该能确保就业和写字楼需求保持在相对高的水平，”他说。
然而，一些建筑的拥有者依然担心最糟糕的情况。“写字楼租出去全靠就业水平，”代表写字楼拥有者和经理人的贸易组织Building Owners and Managers International的主席凯利(John P. Kelly)说，“如果工作外包都海外去了，在新的替代性工作出现之前，写字楼可能就会空置的。”
此外，他还说，市场上还有相当多的影子写字楼空间，即租户没有利用但也没有投入到市场进行再租赁的办公室。目前的影子写字楼空间估计占全美国写字楼面积的4%。“租户续租这些办公室的可能性非常小，”凯利说。
