Home of the Hyperscalers
Flying overseas this week for the annual TCN Worldwide conference, this time in Calgary Alberta, to discuss the state of the CRE business, markets and where is it all heading.
A brief stopover in Seattle on the way has us thinking back to our first visit to Seattle in 2014. The city was taking off with its two largest corporate tenants starting the hyperscale journey that is now the latest boom in the ever-changing CRE industry.
Not long after, construction of office buildings in downtown Seattle was booming as the thirst for office space was insatiable. A client pointed to 4 city blocks in various stages of office construction highlighting that completion dates were 12 months apart. As soon as they were completed, they were occupied.
We visited the Redmond campus using the Seattle to Redmond shuttle. It was then a 10 minute walk from the central bus station to the meeting place. Walk 10 minutes in Sydney or Melbourne CBD’s and see how much of a market one passes. At that time the estimated size of the campus was 1,500,000 m2. That is the same size as Adelaide’s entire CBD office market and that was just the Redmond campus.
Hyperscale data centres were popping up in the US and Europe, and Sydney only really got its first one in the mid 2010’s. The design, structure, capacity and size were constantly changing and the difference between then and now is immense. Even the way deals are done has changed. Standard leasehold transactions are making way for owner occupation in some circumstances.
It will be great to catch up with some of the best data centre CRE practitioners around to hear the latest. It was their tireless razor-sharp focus that laid the foundation for an industry that is now booming.
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