How far and Finnish HQ’s have relocated? - The role of short distance relocations in Finnish HQ moves

Relocation is one of the tasks that corporate real estate management is responsible for. They are important events for organizations as there can be a variety of short and long term impacts due to the relocation. Large portion of previous research has focused on longer distance relocations i.e. relocation between cities or countries although short distance relocations have certain impacts, too. The case with especially smaller organizations is often that they do not withhold required expertise on relocations as they are not conducted on regular basis.This paper focuses on contributing to the knowledge of the relocation phenomenon. The aim is to examine the scale and volume of companies’ HQ relocations. This is done by analyzing the relocation distances and the amounts of relocated companies in order to formulate an understanding of how far and how often companies have relocated. The study uses quantitative data of address changes of Finnish limited liability companies between years 2006 – 2011. The findings of this study indicate that the vast majority of relocations are short distance relocations. Over two thirds of all of the moves were relocations of less than ten kilometres by distance. The average distance that the companies relocated was circa 29 kilometres and the median only less than five kilometres. Further, according to the analysis, some 27 percent of all of the companies had relocated at least once during the five and half year time period of the dataset and some six percent during the last year of the data.The findings of the study give an overall image of the scale and volume of the relocations phenomenon within the private sector in Finland. It is concluded that the vast majority of relocations are actually short distance ones and that average organizations do not conduct relocations that often. Thus, in addition to long distance relocations, the focus in future research should be set more on the impacts of these types of relocations as well.