Thinking out of the box

We have an enormous opportunity to attract talent from all over the world to work here: 52% of South Africa’s fintech start-ups are located in Cape Town.

Amazon’s new campus speaks to this trend, as does the new, and very bold, Luno sign in town. Boxwood is one of the larger office landlords in Cape Town’s Central Business District(CBD).Our focus is to buy run- down office buildings with potential – and then to upgrade them. Through the last two years we have learnt some valuable lessons and we have been humbled and enriched in the process. Covid demanded that we reinvent our approach to our buildings, to our neighbours, to the streetscape and to our tenants. The result is that our redeveloped buildings
are more people focused; they are more adventurous.

A CHANGING CITY

Pre-Covid we intended starting R900 million of redevelopment work. This plan needed a rapid rethink as, unsurprisingly, most property owners cut all building spend to the bone. There was zero visibility of when (or if) Covid would end, and the media was swamped with articles predicting the end of CBDs. It was scary to contemplate. Our response was to drill into why cities existed. Large cities have been around for over 2 000 years and the essence of their longevity is that people want to gather. A key component of this is that we are social beings. One of my ‘lockdown books’ spoke to the reason that Homo sapiens triumphed over the much stronger and bigger brained Neanderthal, was being the latter was a loner, but Homo sapiens were social beings. Being social made us more efficient. Collectively Homo sapiens outwitted Neanderthals.

We concluded that a nasty virus and fast Wi-Fi at home was going to change, but not destroy, our city centres. So we halted our large development but decided to accelerate the redevelopment of three significant office buildings at a cost of R70 million. We were certainly swimming against the tide.

When lockdown eased and we were allowed back to the office, the team spent an afternoon testing our new strategy. We walked the streets and viewed about 25 buildings, including our own. The results were shocking. We could not find one foyer that we loved. Almost without exception, the offices were utterly faceless and uniformly boring. In addition, the streets felt hard as nails. After 15 months of home comforts, how could anyone find this environment appealing? We knew that being in an office was more efficient for business, but we also knew that we had to entice and seduce the office workers back to the city. They would want a warmer, more tactile and softer work experience. And when they stepped onto the street, that street would need to be interesting, have a vibe to it, and be able to entertain.