Top CRE executives discuss the most popular building amenities.

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Jack Sibley, Technology & Innovation Strategies, TH Real Estate

So in general the war for a-mean-it-ies, oh it’s amenities in America.

Hussain Ali-Khan, Global Alliance Director, CBRE

I know from the the employer occupier side that food service generally tends to be mighty popular. From the employer side, from the occupier side, because occupiers are the primary users of amenities, right. They want to take care of their employees in certain ways that make them productive, retain talent, you know manage spend, all those types of things. So manage productivity. Right. I mean having a cafeteria in the office is way better than having to go down the street and lose some time, even though you may want to do that.

Adam Stoltz, National Director, Consulting Services - Transwestern

Yes. There are certainly amenities that are popular and more popular than others. And frankly this is one of those things that we see being a component of understanding human behavior.

Fitness centers fall into this category of things that if you ask people will say absolutely I would love a fitness center in this building. I think what people are saying is that they would love to have immediate proximity to something that they would rather be doing more often than less often, working out gaining access to a fitness facility. But when they get put in they don't get use. They certainly don't get used to the extent that we expect them to be used.

So fitness facilities is an example or one of those things say perhaps the amenity is actually about access to a fitness facility down the block, or across the street, or even in the neighborhood or neighborhoods that we understand most of our tenants to live in or or come from

Kent Tarrach, VP, Asset Management & Global Corporate Development, Brookfield

Amenities that we find to be most popular, to date, there's not a whole lot of surprises. Amenities around fitness and wellness. Your gyms. Your fitness classes and experiences like that are certainly seem to be very very popular. The other features that we find to be very popular are around food. People love to eat and people need to eat. And if you can provide an excellent selection of food options for both lunchtime and dinnertime as people will continue to work later and later, we find that the occupants in our buildings are very responsive to that.

Gabrielle Rubin Deveaux, Global Real Estate & Facilities, Buzzfeed

I think the places that have been the most popular as far as the amenities in our space has been two. One is our outdoor roof and terrace because well it's an outdoor space and that's amazing. And there's not that many of them, so to be able to be able to sit outside, and have breakfast, and work on a laptop on a beautiful sunny day is good. And it's probably healthier for you as well to get outside and get some fresh air.

I think the other space that is great for our amenities is we have a 9,000 square foot canteen which is a multipurpose space. Wo we can use it for events, we can use it for an all hands, and it's actually helped us a lot as far as our employees and our revenue because we do so many events. And it was sort of one of those if you build it they will come.

Adam Stoltz, National Director, Consulting Services - Transwestern

Certainly, an amenity that is incredibly attractive to people in having a direct impact on the space that they take and how they use it are meeting facilities, shared conferencing, and the like. The tension there of course is being able to decide well to what degree does that change that envelope of space a tenant occupies, the overall space program, and how much of that experience the meeting experience do they really want to be able to control, versus what are they willing to have be more building led that they can insert themselves into.

Jack Sibley, Technology & Innovation Strategies, TH Real Estate

So concentrating on things like fitness, well-being, where a lot of that is dictated by I suppose the type of building that actually working with many cases and also the type of market. So in the West Coast you see that kind of war for talent actually driving lots of employers to provide those amenities within that space. Whereas on the East Coast it's slightly more common amenities are really driving value.

John Gilbert, EVP, COO, CTO, Rudin Management

Also important, from a bandwidth distribution standpoint you know we've kind of forgotten about the connection that we have to the outside world. Speed, resiliency, sustainability of that. We're actually bringing broadband fixed wireless to 32 Avenue of the Americas, which is a building that we own and developed at Rudin. And ultimately that's going to create a totally separate and diverse pathway for bandwidth connectivity to the building.

Dock 72 is surrounded on three sides by water. So redundancy, it only has one entrance. So we had to figure out a way to come in in a second way and we're bringing in microwave down through the roof and then distributing that throughout the building a gigabit, multi-gigabit speeds. It will be very very unique.

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