It is now almost universally accepted that we are not all going back to the office, at least not full time. So what does that mean for the proportion of commercial real estate that will be surplus to requirements? As the post-Covid world begins to take shape, property owners must find an alternative use for potentially many millions of square feet of once-prime space.  

Simply knocking it down and building something else is the typical solution for property that has become obsolete, though the waste of materials and the embodied carbon this represents is becoming much less acceptable. If only there was some wealthy, space-hungry group of building users, keenly aware of the need to manage their carbon footprint, just waiting to occupy all that empty property …

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. To say the data centre sector is growing is a colossal understatement. Some US$100bn has been poured into the asset class over the past decade, and the signs are that it has barely got started. The amount of data the world generates and uses is increasing at a vertiginous rate, with some 90% of all the data that has ever existed being created over the past two years.