Sanko Estate's strategic real estate services for Regus Group PLC.
Our relationship with Sanko dates back to the late 1990s when Regus was looking for commercial space in Tokyo and Sanko came to the fore as a local real estate organization that knows the Tokyo market extremely well and had a good capability dealing with foreign companies.
Regus Group is the world's largest provider of fully equipped office space and executive suites for rent, and what we look for in real estate agents is the best way they can help us secure the best spaces we can. We now have seven business centres in Japan - and hope to contract space for our eighth in a few months - and Sanko has worked with us on five of these including our Shibuya Mark City centre.
Business centres are still a little known form of real estate solution in Tokyo and we've found that we have to educate landlords as to what such centres are about and how having a centre in their building is a value-add for them. Over the years Sanko has helped us in presenting the Regus credentials in a Japanese way putting emphasis on how Regus can bring benefits to landlords. With Shibuya Mark City we had the landlord come to see some of our other Tokyo centres to get a better sense of the quality we bring.
At Mark City, the space available for lease was 525 tsubo but we managed to convince the landlord that we could put the common space in front of the elevator lobbies to effective use as an impressive reception area without compromising any of the building's standards. In this way we increased our floor space to about 700 tsubo.
We see Sanko as a strategic partner in terms of our continuing desire to develop our business in Tokyo, and we are looking to try and continue to benefit from the Sanko database and the relationship Sanko has with landlords in and around Tokyo.
What we need is good intelligence about what's happening in the real estate market overall. The Tokyo market, relative to others in Asia, is very expensive and this makes it one where the due diligence has to be much more careful because the quantity of the investment made is so large. We're extremely happy with the relationship we have with Sanko Estate.
Filippo Sarti
Managing Director, Asia Pacific
Regus Group PLC
http://www.regus.jp
http://www.regus.com