Why eight Tokyo minutes from office to metro is too long | The city is seeing a boom in commercial construction but labour scarcity has made location a critical concern for companies
Why eight Tokyo minutes from office to metro is too long | The city is seeing a boom in commercial construction but labour scarcity has made location a critical concern for companies
🚨⚠️🚨 **WARNING** 🚨⚠️🚨: not safe for burgers (*sad transit-less eagle noises*)
> How far, in an age of demographically turbocharged choice, should a country’s best and brightest be expected to walk from the nearest station to their place of work?
> Two minutes? No problem. Four? Fine, provided there’s coffee on the way. Eight? Forget it. So, bad luck if your company sits in the barren wilderness outside this modest radius: labour has scarcity on its side these days and no one is going to come and work for you. Apparently.
> The location of Tokyo’s walkability-workability inflection point and what it might mean for Japan’s great megacity has become a preoccupation of Goldman Sachs. The investment bank has, coincidentally, just moved its Japan headquarters into a tower directly above a Metro station.
> In a September 10 note to clients, Goldman’s real estate analyst, Sachiko Okada, took a look at office relocation trends within central Tokyo, overlaying that with a calculation of average walking distances between offices and the nearest station — a metric commonly used in Japan’s commercial and residential real estate markets and pivotal in a metropolis where the overwhelming majority of commuters travel by rail.
> Okada’s analysis comes at a time when the five innermost wards of Tokyo have never looked so frenetic, with Godzilla-scale office construction in prime locations. Around 1.2mn square metres of new space is due to come on to the market in 2025, she says. Even in a still heavily office-based work culture, that could push overall vacancy rates higher.
> But the issue, as ever, is location. For offices within Tokyo’s five central wards, the average walk from a station is a breezy three minutes 42 seconds, with 64 per cent within the four-minute walk zone that even the heaviest-footed sloth cannot grumble about. But a significant amount — roughly 7 per cent — lies outside an eight-minute walk. Back in the days where Japanese companies were routinely able to make staff feel grateful to have a job, and surveys showed far higher ratios of people prioritising their work over everything else, that was less of an issue.
> But now, with priorities shifting, labour more willing to quit and companies increasingly unable to meet their staffing targets, proximity to stations is yet another battleground in the war to attract and keep good staff.
> Given Japan’s declining working population and the growing need for tenant companies to retain talented employees, argues Okada, there is an increasing pressure on companies to relocate nearer to stations. Her note concludes with an appendix of dozens that have begun to do just that. So roll on the relocation — and don’t force the precious labour force to walk.
1 Comment
🚨⚠️🚨 **WARNING** 🚨⚠️🚨: not safe for burgers (*sad transit-less eagle noises*)
> How far, in an age of demographically turbocharged choice, should a country’s best and brightest be expected to walk from the nearest station to their place of work?
> Two minutes? No problem. Four? Fine, provided there’s coffee on the way. Eight? Forget it. So, bad luck if your company sits in the barren wilderness outside this modest radius: labour has scarcity on its side these days and no one is going to come and work for you. Apparently.
> The location of Tokyo’s walkability-workability inflection point and what it might mean for Japan’s great megacity has become a preoccupation of Goldman Sachs. The investment bank has, coincidentally, just moved its Japan headquarters into a tower directly above a Metro station.
> In a September 10 note to clients, Goldman’s real estate analyst, Sachiko Okada, took a look at office relocation trends within central Tokyo, overlaying that with a calculation of average walking distances between offices and the nearest station — a metric commonly used in Japan’s commercial and residential real estate markets and pivotal in a metropolis where the overwhelming majority of commuters travel by rail.
> Okada’s analysis comes at a time when the five innermost wards of Tokyo have never looked so frenetic, with Godzilla-scale office construction in prime locations. Around 1.2mn square metres of new space is due to come on to the market in 2025, she says. Even in a still heavily office-based work culture, that could push overall vacancy rates higher.
> But the issue, as ever, is location. For offices within Tokyo’s five central wards, the average walk from a station is a breezy three minutes 42 seconds, with 64 per cent within the four-minute walk zone that even the heaviest-footed sloth cannot grumble about. But a significant amount — roughly 7 per cent — lies outside an eight-minute walk. Back in the days where Japanese companies were routinely able to make staff feel grateful to have a job, and surveys showed far higher ratios of people prioritising their work over everything else, that was less of an issue.
> But now, with priorities shifting, labour more willing to quit and companies increasingly unable to meet their staffing targets, proximity to stations is yet another battleground in the war to attract and keep good staff.
> Given Japan’s declining working population and the growing need for tenant companies to retain talented employees, argues Okada, there is an increasing pressure on companies to relocate nearer to stations. Her note concludes with an appendix of dozens that have begun to do just that. So roll on the relocation — and don’t force the precious labour force to walk.
!ping JAPAN&YIMBY