CBRE on Home-Based Employees

More and more people are working from home, and not just those that have started their own businesses. Many major corporations are also having their employees work from home as well. CB Richard Ellis recently came out with a report on this trend called “Exploring the Virtual Workplace With Home Agents.” It found that there are about 200,000 people working from home in a call-center job capacity, and that figure is expected to shoot up to 330,000 next year. So how will this increase in workers away from the office impact the commercial real estate industry? GlobeSt.com spoke with Kara Burns and Rob Marsh, both of CBRE’s Labor Analytics Group, to find out.

GlobeSt.com: Is part of what you’re doing helping companies decide if they need more home-agent workers and how to implement that strategy?

Burns: Not quite exactly. We do this labor-market analysis and will help the site selection in a lot of cases. We look at companies that often times have large, labor-intensive operations. We deal with a lot of call centers, as well as large back-office operations, and deal with a large gamut of different types of organizations and facilities. A lot of our clients do operate some sort of call center, and they’ve asked us a lot about these home agents. It’s a hot topic. What we are trying to do is help people think about the home-agent platform, how that integrates into what we have now, and as they’re evaluating their current portfolio help them figure out what labor markets are best suited for this type of operation. We’re helping them on the labor side to see how viable the markets are where they’re in and how they would work for home agents>