A new age for office space: What happens to the office market when offices adapt?

WITH remote working high on the agenda and businesses looking to cut costs, early doomsayers had proclaimed a grim post-pandemic future for offices and their landlords.

Yet a recent survey of firms in the Asia-Pacific by CBRE showed that about two-thirds of those polled now plan to eventually limit remote working to one or two days weekly.

And the latest data showed that office rents rose in the first quarter of this year. According to the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), rents of office space in Singapore's central region rose 3.3 per cent quarter on quarter in Q1 2021, reversing from a 3.5 per cent contraction in the fourth quarter of last year.