On the heels of the great recession in December 2010, I wrote about whether the trend of office tenants moving to urban areas is a secular shift or an aberration (“Downtowns Drawing Tenants Over Suburbs: Secular Shift or Aberration?“), concluding that companies that are location neutral (i.e., don’t need to be suburban or urban) will be driven by qualitative factors including, most importantly, labor.  Here in Chicago and many other markets nationally, we’ve seen an increasing number of companies relocating all or a portion of their operations to the Central Business District (or surrounding areas).  Most recently, it was announced that McDonald’s Corporation will relocate their HQ from west suburban Oak Brook to Chicago.  With urban office rents being considerably higher than suburban, these companies are not looking at real estate from purely a cost perspective, but rather how it can be a strategic tool in driving their core business.  In this post, I summarize the reasons underlying this trend, what we can expect in the future and what is happening in Chicago as an illustration of this national and global trend.  I also explore why some companies have decided to stay in the suburbs.

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