Where do office workers want to work?

It is clear from our survey that the city and town centre remains the dominant preference for office workers throughout the UK. 58% of the respondents would most like to spend the majority of their working time in a city and town centre. The provision of local amenities, good access to public transport networks and the opportunity to cluster with similar businesses have driven this demand. This is the dominant preference across all age groups and geographies in the UK. Edinburgh has the highest proportion of respondents who preferred to work in the city and town centre at 80%. A key point here is that regardless of age, there were similar results across the four office location types for the various age groups – the city is the preferred location across all groups.

The quality of the city centre offering has improved across the UK in recent years with new mixed-use developments transforming the public realm. This has resulted in strong occupier demand for ‘Grade A' city centre space. The development pipeline is constrained in all major regional cities with limited speculative development taking place. The preference for office workers to work in the city centre could result in greater pre-letting activity from corporate occupiers who have upcoming lease events in the next three years.

As shown in Chart 1 below, the business park in the UK looks to be an unloved option. However, office workers' response to the impact on their wellbeing is very similar to the result for the city and town centre. Also, satisfaction with air quality is much higher for business park workers. However, the satisfaction with the proximity to retail and leisure is significantly lower – this is being actively addressed by many business park owners across the UK, with amenity offering increasing significantly in the past few years.

A rural location was the second most popular location with 18% of respondents preferring to work there; Cambridgeshire had the highest proportion of staff who wanted to work in rural locations at 35%. However, only 4% of respondents across the UK work in rural locations. This indicates that there is an undersupply in office space in rural locations to cater for current demand. This creates an opportunity for rural workspace providers.

_{Read the articles within Savills What Works Want Survey below.}