CBRE: Build residential capsules in office buildings amid COVID-19 crisis

This plan will help save small office renters who cannot pay their rent, and it will solve the plight of real estate developers.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
The White City (photo credit: MOR BACHAR)
The White City
(photo credit: MOR BACHAR)
In the wake of the coronavirus crisis in which many hi-tech firms have made employees work from home there are tens of thousands of square meters of vacant office space.
Jacky Mukmel, chairman of CBRE Israel, has proposed a revolutionary plan to make those office buildings multi-functional, incorporating residential capsules for employees, thus allowing employees to “work from home” at their offices without the offices being overcrowded.
“Within about six months, with the approval of the Interior Ministry and the local authorities, approximately 10% of the office buildings can be turned into residential capsules, with each capsule being 12 sq.m.,” he said.
This plan will help save small office renters who cannot pay their rent, and it will solve the plight of real estate developers, who have tens of thousands of square meters in their buildings that are vacant, he said.
Mukmel said that in large cities around the world a lot of hi-tech firms have built residential capsules for some workers, making office buildings very useful and saving young workers the cost of high rents and saving workers time commuting or finding parking spaces. Some have even established a cultural environment for the younger generation with restaurants, pubs, bars and clubs to allow employees a better life around the workplace.
The capsules will be managed by the company or the building’s management company.
More than 5,000 residential capsules can be set up in office towers in two to three years, and the phenomenon will spread throughout the country and within a decade, tens of thousands of residential capsules will be available in office centers, Mukmel said.
“It is time to join hands with companies, real estate developers, the Interior Ministry and the local authorities and adopt this plan, which also needs the local authorities to courageously give up part of the municipal taxes they charge on offices and change the map of the Israeli office industry.”


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