Dubai is the favoured location for senior GCC management executives to locate their company’s head office, according to a survey compiled by real estate consultancy firm CB Richard Ellis (CBRE).
The CBRE survey found that 31 percent of senior management deemed the emirate to be the best location in the Middle East to operate a head office from.
The UAE capital Abu Dhabi was second in the rankings with 21 percent of managers surveyed seeing it as a good location to operate their business.
The study, compiled by Insight Discovery and released to coincide with the launch of Cityscape Global in Dubai, revealed that price was the determining factor for 46 percent of respondents.
Around 70 percent of respondents said they believed head office costs are better now than before the economic crisis and, on average, managers allocate a fifth of their operating costs to leasing real estate.
“The results of the research conducted is very encouraging for the UAE market,” said Nick Maclean, managing director of CBRE Middle East. “Commercial real estate prices have decreased globally following the economic financial crisis and this will help attract companies to the Middle East when previously the region, especially the UAE, was often considered too expensive to operate in.”
This sentiment was echoed on Sunday by Michael Atwell, head of Middle East operations for real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield, who said the property slump in Dubai would help to eliminate the perception that the emirate was an expensive place to set up business.
“The perception of Dubai still lies in its older view of the market in that it is expensive, office rents are very high and it’s an expensive place to recruit people and house them in terms of housing costs. We all know that has changed significantly in the past couple of years; rents have fallen. There is an opportunity for Dubai to change its image in the market,” added Atwell.
