New firms, old assets: Using Delphi technique to identify accommodation priorities for knowledge intensive firms

The nature of contemporary businesses has become increasingly dynamic, particularly in sectors recognized as 'knowledge intensive'. This rate of change, in turn, impacts on all inputs to those businesses - including human resources, social capital, finance, intellectual property and commercial real property assets. Because of the fixed investment that property assets represent, they may not be as quick to respond to such rapid and radical change and large capital outlay will often be required for any reconfiguration or upgrades to accommodate these new requirements. The current property and asset management approach needs to better recognise the fundamentally different ways in which many of these firms consider and use commercial property. A key starting point is to understand the demand drivers and the real priorities of these businesses particularly those generally defined as knowledge intensive which represent, arguably the fastest growing component of the commercial sector. This empirical paper provides the results that emerged from a Delphi study which used ten experts to more accurately define these priorities. It is based on a study in the commercial sector in the high growth area of South-east Queensland in Australia. The demand priority responses varied depending on the lifecycle stage (start-up, established or mature) of the firm. Many of the findings are likely to be applicable to the commercial environments elsewhere and would provide a basis for investors, developers, asset owners and managers to better position their assets for future success.