Guest editorial
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Volume 13, Issue 2
Welcome to this second special issue of the Journal of Corporate Real Estate with papers from a real estate society conference. This time, we aimed for giving the special issue a theme, which became “User needs and preferences”. We received submissions from both the 17th European Real Estate Society (ERES) conference that took place in Milan, and from the sister-society American Real Estate Society (ARES), which held their annual conference in Naples, Florida. This special issue contains a selection of three papers from the ERES conference and one paper from the ARES conference,looking into user needs from several perspectives. All four papers show that there is still a big research gap in this area and that user needs are an important issue for CREM.
As Peggie Rothe, Anna-Liisa Lindholm, Ari Hyvönen and Suvi Nenonen stated in the first paper of this issue “User preferences of office occupiers – investigating the differences”, there is quite a fragmented research focusing on users’ needs, preferences and requirements. With this paper on Rothe’s doctoral work, she tries to approach user needs in a more holistic way. The results of an internet-based questionnaire on 81 workplace attributes, show that different preferences come forward with age,gender and with differences in work style.
The second paper “The impact of generational differences on the workplace” goes into the influence of age on user needs in more detail. Barry P. Haynes distinguished four generations (Veterans, Baby Boomers and Generations X and Y) and draws together the work on generations of academics with unpublished work from leading practitioners in this field. Because these practitioners do not always benefit from publishing in journals, their work remains hidden from many of our readers, which is a pity that this paper of Haynes overcomes.
The third paper is called “Examining the building selection decision-making process within corporate relocations: to design and evaluate a client focused tool to support objective decision making”. Nick; Nunnington and Barry P. Haynes developed an extensive tool to match user demand with market supply that is tested with students as described in their paper. As they mention, the new tool has significantly shifted the focus of the methodology from building supply to occupier demand, which is what the current market is all about.
The final paper in this issue provides “An end-user’s perspective on activity-based office concepts”. Rianne Appel-Muelenbroek, Peter Groenen and Ingrid Janssen, have performed an evaluative study on the effectiveness of activity-based office concepts through observation and a survey of 182 end-users from four organizations. The study showed that the office concept is not always used as intended what could result in a loss in productivity, illness and dissatisfaction. Also, people’s personal preferences seem to have a bigger effect on the use of certain types of workplaces than some workstation facilities.
This summer the ERES conference will take place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands). The conference will be the responsibility of my own group at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and we hope for even more CRE papers. Please see this guest editorial as a very warm invitation for all of you readers to attend our conference (see also www.eres2011.com).
Rianne Appel-MeulenbroekGuest Editor
