L'ENTRETIEN : Andy Poppink, EMEA CEO, JLL

Thank you for having me, Luke.

It's a very good question. I think our global real estate market has transitioned a fair amount due to the pandemic. It's also accelerated trends that were already underway. And it's great to be back here at MIPIM, where you see a full crowd of the people who are such a critical part of the real estate life cycle. To me, it's important, Luke, to remember what real estate is solving. We're providing spaces for people to live, for people to work, for people to move goods. In particular, when you think about the office sector, real estate is not there to serve itself; it's serving the people. So it's solving a people challenge, which is solving a productivity and profitability challenge for companies. What we've seen is a much more people-centric approach to real estate, so that it's serving the individual, serving our people from a health and well-being standpoint, and really trying to fit the needs of what the future of work is going to look like. And we all know that's evolving a fair amount.

Yes, well, thank you for that question. I relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area, also known as Silicon Valley, where you get some of the largest global tech companies that are big brands and make headlines. Even just this week, Google and Apple announced their return to work programs. It's a complex question because early on, many of the technology companies were first to have their employees work remotely, and it made big headlines about how people would have flexibility to work. Many of those programs were honestly already underway and in place, but it made big headlines. Whereas in EMEA, we saw more of an attraction to people wanting to be in the offices. In part, I think it's the relationship to work and living spaces, and then societally there's a little more separation there. So we had our teams in Paris, as an example, effectively in the office throughout the pandemic. So I think there's a difference there. But we're starting to see, because of the headlines that come from the Googles and Apples and others who are tech companies who are also enabling the ability to work remotely and work from everywhere, I think we're starting to see that in mass we're coming back to offices as a really critical component of our work-life balance and how companies operate.

Absolutely. So there are some very clear trends, and we'll hear a lot about them while we're here at MIPIM. Certainly ESG, making sure that we've got places that are supporting our ESG goals. That's one. Health and well-being, absolutely, that's a second one, focusing on how we're supporting the individuals. And the third is the infusion of technology, which actually supports those first two. And when you think about this, we've gone through these last two years. People moved to the hybrid working model, and they want to transform. Those transformations don't happen overnight. First, we don't know exactly how it's going to play out because we were surveying employees in an environment where they didn't know what the future looked like. So how do you answer a question about coming back to an office you have no idea what it looks like? So it was tough. You had to do some trial and error. And then it also takes capital. It takes planning and strategy, and then it also takes capital to transform. When you think about JLL as a company, we're now over 100,000 people with a vast portfolio of office space ourselves. We have leases that expire rolling out to 15 years. So you couldn't dump all of that capital across the globe at one time. That capital is not readily available for that purpose, and it wouldn't make sense because you've got leases expiring and we've got to figure out what works for an employee population in a geography for the businesses that they're doing. So I think it is very much of a journey. And so there's capital that needs to go into the spaces, which creates opportunity from a leasing standpoint, because these spaces of yesterday aren't necessarily going to serve the purposes of not just tomorrow but today. So it does create some activity, and we're starting to see that pick up, certainly towards the end of the year last year and over the first two months of 2022, very active leasing markets in the core markets.