CBRE LA Unveils "Unteathered" Office Concept

The rise of alternative office space has been much publicized over the past few years, equally cherished and despised depending on your target audience. After all, what may work for one business or industry would be disastrous for others. Still, as open-concept offices continue to be seen as trendy and hip and key for attracting a younger generation of workers, more and more are cropping up across the country.

While you may expect this from an ad agency or a tech startup, getting the more traditional industries that still wear suits and ties to work to buy in, such as those discussed on this site, is certainly more of a challenge. I can tell you in my experience it is incredibly easy to predict what tenants will want "hip" space and which will want traditional build outs.

That all changed yesterday, however, as Roger Vincent of the LA Times reported that CBRE's 200-person office in downtown L.A. now has no assigned desks or offices.

CBRE is generally considered both the market leader and best brand in commercial real estate, so their influence will undoubtedly be felt and their efforts emulated. That being said, commercial real estate has a long history of closed doors, secrets, and subterfuge when it comes to prospecting and deal making that one has to wonder how well it would go over. It wasn't that long ago that offices and desk drawers were locked every time someone left the office - now both drawers and offices are being eliminated?

When he heard about a shake-up at company headquarters, Mark Sprague got a knot in the pit of his stomach. It wasn't his executive job that was at stake at the international real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc. It was his spacious office of 11 years, his cherished file cabinets and his trophies. They all had to go.

Sprague and everyone else in the company's 200-person office were given no choice by management. Everyone was to be part of an experiment to create the company's first completely "untethered" office in the United States where employees roam freely. In the airy complex on the top two floors of a Bunker Hill tower, there are no assigned desks or offices. Workers doing similar tasks can join their peers in a "neighborhood" or plop down on a modernist couch. Even Chief Executive Robert Sulentic books an office by the day and shed many of his possessions as part of the big move last month.

"No family pictures, no tokens, no nothing that is mine," he said.

Improvements in technology have made framed photos outmoded. "I have lots of family pictures on my iPhone," Sulentic said. "Five years ago we didn't have that."

When the boss leaves the office at night, he takes everything to an assigned locker or home in a briefcase. The firm's goal was to reduce rent costs by using its office space more efficiently and to create a template for other CBRE offices around the world. If it worked, company officials figured, the downtown L.A. office would also be an example for other conservative white-collar firms pondering how to reorganize their workplaces to make them more efficient and appealing to young employees weaned on wireless technology.

Laughing as I though about my Principals or VP's giving up their treasured private offices, I reached out to a couple of my local CBRE acquaintances for comment and quickly got the following responses:

"Yes, it’s pretty cool, but fortunately for us we relocated our space in July 2012 and narrowly missed the new corporate mandate." -An Executive Vice President

"That would have been us...had we not just moved into new digs on a 10 year lease." -A First Vice President

"Apparently they’ve talked about doing that in our office.. I’m sure some of the older guys would piss all over it pretty quickly." -An Associate

"What would I do without my picture of you and your (once) perfect quaf of hair? I guess I would have to wear a locket…" -Another Associate

Luckily for that last guy, he can still keep a picture of me on his phone, but I think it's clear that while the international executives are pressing ahead, there is certainly resistance at the local level.

Peter Miscovich, head of workplace innovation at rival Jones Lang LaSalle, explained the rationale another way. "It's a cost-avoidance strategy," he said. In fact, while it cost 15% more to build out the CBRE space, they were able to reduce the overall floor plate and save 30% with reductions in projected rent and office capital expenditures. If a "button-down firm such as CBRE" can make a move like this, he argues, "The beginning of the workplace revolution has finally arrived."

"I thought the place would feel impersonal," Mark Sprague said. "It's almost more personal, in a different way. It really does have a sense of community."

Still, one has to wonder about the logistics of it all. In a 200-person office, do the associates make cold calls on the open floor, annoying everyone? Is the "Chinese firewall" between tenant and agency brokers broken by the lack of actual walls? Will successful new executives be content with not getting the corner office they busted ass for?

While it is debatable if this layout is the wave of the future, it most certainly is the trend of the near future. Who knows...it could happen to you next.

see a similar discussion here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-origin-of-cubicles…