The locations chosen by end-users and tenants are the drivers of the real estate markets. You may have a terrific office building at a great location, but if no tenants want to move in, you’re in trouble. Location decisions are complex processes with a number of different factors influencing the final choice.

Ask a single 23-year old IT-nerd what he thinks are important quality-of-life factors and you will get a completely different answer than from a 36-year old woman with two young children working in the same company. This in a nutshell sums up the problem with ‘quality of life’ as a location factor. We know that it is important for the locations of headquarter operations, creative industries and organisations with expatriates, but how do you measure it?

Mercer Human Resource Consulting attempts to do just that with the publication of an annual Quality of Living Survey. The study is based on detailed assessments of 39 key quality-of-living determinants, grouped in categories such as political and social environment (political stability, crime, law enforcement), economic environment, socio-cultural environment (for example limitations on personal freedom), medical and health considerations, schools and education, housing, natural environment, etc. The results of the ranking shown in the table are surprising. The first seven positions are taken up by Swiss, German and Austrian cities.

But what about all those dynamic, sexy cities where everybody wants to go? In the Mercer survey Paris ranks 19th, followed by London, Barcelona, Madrid and Milan further down the scale. For these cities the Cushman & Wakefield European Cities Monitor comes to the rescue. The managers interviewed for this survey think that their employees are best off in Barcelona, Paris, Stockholm, Munich and Madrid (see table).

That may be what the managers think, but what about the inhabitants of the cities themselves? Another European study concludes that the citizens of Stockholm, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Vienna and Glasgow are the most satisfied with the cities in which they live. The result is: three rankings with three totally different results! Only Copenhagen and Vienna are found in the top 10 of all three rankings.

So what conclusion can we draw from this? It comes down to the basics. What kind of employees do you want to attract from the local labour pool or from abroad for your new operations and what is really important for them? You may be surprised to learn that many companies do not do the obvious: interview the employees they want to hire and match the quality of life of the cities they are considering with their requirements!

René Buck is president of Buck Consultants International

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