By Alexander Heuff, Group Director, Cityscape
Location has always mattered in real estate. But across the GCC, what makes a location work is changing.
Developers are no longer judged only on where a project sits or what it looks like. Increasingly, the question is how well it connects to the activity around it, from transport links and business districts to major roads, airports and ports.
For industrial projects, that relationship is obvious. For commercial, residential and mixed-use schemes, it is becoming just as important.
Right design and tenant mix
A commercial project may have the right design and tenant mix, but businesses still need reliable access for staff, suppliers and customers. Retail depends on regular deliveries, while residential communities create constant demand for services. Mixed-use districts bring all of those requirements together, making access and infrastructure an increasingly important part of how well a place functions once occupied.
The larger and more complex a project becomes, the harder it is to treat these considerations as something to solve later.
Across Cityscape’s regional markets, we are seeing new communities, business districts, industrial projects and mixed-use destinations coming to market at scale. One of the challenges for developers is ensuring that the infrastructure around them can support the activity they are intended to generate.
City expansion
That becomes particularly important as Gulf cities expand into new areas. New districts change how people travel to work, where businesses operate and how goods and services reach them. Industrial sites depend on efficient access to transport networks, while commercial and residential areas need to remain practical for the people using them every day.
If that surrounding network is weak, even a well-designed project can become less attractive to occupiers and harder to use effectively.
This is why access is moving further up the real estate agenda. It is no longer simply a question of proximity or planning. It can influence occupier demand, day-to-day performance and the long-term appeal of a project.
Qatar offers a useful example of how these issues are coming together. More than 70 developers are expected to present over 400 live projects at Cityscape Qatar this October, offering a snapshot of the scale and range of development now coming to market. As that pipeline grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to judge the strength of a project without also looking at the infrastructure that supports it.
Connectivity
What good connectivity means will vary by asset. For commercial real estate, it may be proximity to transport routes, employment centres and established business districts. For industrial developments, road, port and airport access can have a much more direct bearing on whether a site works for its intended occupiers. Mixed-use destinations face a different challenge, because they must accommodate residents, employees, customers, suppliers and services within the same place.
Developers do not need to become logistics specialists, but they do need to understand how their projects fit into the wider workings of a city. Considering that relationship early can make a clear difference to how a project performs once it moves from plan to reality.
Creating activity
Real estate creates activity by its nature. Offices bring employees, visitors and suppliers. Retail requires customers and deliveries. Residential communities create ongoing demand for services, while industrial assets depend on reliable access to the wider market.
As more projects come forward across the GCC, those relationships will become harder to ignore. The next phase of growth should therefore be judged not only by how much real estate is delivered, but by how well those projects function within the cities and economic networks around them.
For developers, that means looking beyond the boundaries of the site itself. The projects most likely to remain useful and attractive over time will be those that are well connected to the people, businesses and infrastructure they are designed to serve.
