[Herald Interview] C&W eyes Seoul's robust demand for overseas commercial properties

Global commercial real estate services provider Cushman & Wakefield is looking to expand its Korean client pool for overseas deals, while riding on the wave of demand for properties in Seoul, according to its Korea and Japan chief.

“Seoul is definitely in the tier one bucket, where we want to focus a lot of our investment, growth and make sure we continue to have a larger and a very strong platform,” Todd Olson, executive managing director of North Asia at Cushman & Wakefield said in an interview with The Korea Herald.

Olson envisions a two-track strategy for Seoul, which he considers a top-class market in the Asia-Pacific region, along with Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo.

“One (track) is more outbound, bringing Korean investors, brands and companies to cross-border (transactions) outside of Korea. We see a big opportunity and we want to do more,” he said.

With more Korean retail brands expanding outside of Korea, Cushman & Wakefield has been seeing continued growth in outbound demand here. The real estate company plans to suit to the needs of the clients searching for overseas properties to size up globally.

“The other one would be expanding our services. Historically, we have done more inbound multinational companies, but we want to do more end-users, and corporate clients for a lot of our service platforms that we have already,” he said.

“What's kind of unique to the Korean market is that (the recent financial environment is) also creating an opportunity for end users or corporates to acquire real estate for their headquarters buildings,” he said.

Corporates in other countries generally prefer to put their profit into their business, rather than sitting on real estate investments, as they are unwilling to store the extra capital in properties, he explained.

Another key area of growth for Korea would be data centers, a highly after asset in the era of soaring demand for data processing and storage.

“We have made some new hires, focusing on human resources as part of our Asia-Pacific data center practice,” he said.

Yet, concern about Korea’s tight restraints on data center projects remains a hurdle, Olson stressed. “Regulatory constraints, including power shortages and development restrictions in Seoul and Gyeonggi, continue to impede progress on data center projects,” he said.

The Special Act on the Activation of Distributed Energy, which aims to decentralize data centers away from the Greater Seoul Area to regional areas, was enforced in June.

“If Korea relaxes its regulations to encourage investment it may stimulate growth in this sector as the demand is significant.”