Executive Summary

The background for this study lies in the difficult situation on the real estate market and the fact that methodological concepts are increasingly being used in real estate business. To date, no analyses focusing on the needs of future tenants have been done for the top segment of the Frankfurt am Main office real estate market. The city of Frankfurt am Main was chosen as the location for the analysis, because it is one of the most important office real estate markets in Europe . The goal of this study is to determine the placement horizon and to evaluate future user demands on exclusive office real estate in Frankfurt ’s best locations.

The study offers a comparative overview of important benchmarks for the economic development of Germany and Frankfurt . From the depiction of cyclical developments in the general economic process, it progresses on to the behavior of market players in real estate. With this background information, interdependencies between German economic benchmarks and Frankfurt ’s real estate benchmarks will be determined using correlation analyses. Using Germany ’s GDP as an identified indicator, a prognosis for (numbers of future) office workers will be made. Based on this, and taking the employment rate and office space per employee into account, a demand prognosis can be made for the specific market of exclusive office real estate in Frankfurt . This is followed by an analysis of supply, including an in-depth competition analysis. Supply and demand will be compared in worst case, best case, and realistic case scenarios, in order to determine the placement horizon.
Sustainable project development is the second focus of the study. In order to maintain a competitive advantage in difficult real estate economic times, it is important to have knowledge of users’ demands. The needs of future clients in the field of exclusive office real estate were determined through interviews with experts and questionnaires/inquiries of future users of the upper-class segment.
In the realistic case scenario, the placement horizon for future project developments at top locations in Frankfurt was determined to be in the time period following 2009. Due to this time span, the unreliability of the supply and demand prognoses must be taken into account. A number of trends were determined for user demands. Such trends include higher requirements on equipment and services on the one hand, and an increasing demand for IT integration, for example in wireless LAN technology, on the other, which will have an effect on the physical structure of the real estate objects.

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