Survey touts cities for office locations

If businesses want to keep recruiting and maintaining top talent in New Jersey, then they will have to move out of suburbs and get back to their urban roots, according to one survey.

If businesses want to keep recruiting and maintaining top talent in New Jersey, then they will have to move out of suburbs and get back to their urban roots, according to one survey.

According to CBRE‘s recent survey of all-sized corporations with office facilities in the state, 50 percent of businesses must have amenities specific to big cities — including access to downtown areas and major public transit. Such data reflects a trend that began in the last five years among millennial workers — and, likewise, employers — in adopting a “live, work, play” attitude to start an exodus back to cities like Hoboken and Newark, according to CBRE senior vice president Gregory Barkan.

“A reverse commute to the ‘burbs is not in the cards for most” millennials, urban land demographer Christopher B. Leinberger said in a press release. “Companies moved out to the suburbs to attract their baby boomer parents, raising their kids in suburban isolation. The millennials are doing what many generations have done in the past; they have rejected how they were raised.”

Several large corporations have caught onto this trend and begun moving their branches out of the suburbs. Panasonic will relocate from Secaucus to Newark — and bring 800 employees with it — by 2013, and Pearson has received a state grant to move offices — plus another 650 employees — to Hoboken.

“Of course employers want to appeal to workers with amenities that will attract them, but providing those things in an urban office gives businesses an advantage too,” Barkan said. “Corporations know that workers already spend lots of time in the office, so why wouldn’t they jump at the chance to surround workers with cafeterias and fitness centers — ‘deal breaker must-haves’ in our survey—and keep them in the building?”