America's corporate employees are voting on where they want to come to work based not only on how old their workspaces are, but more often on the cost of living of the surrounding area, said Howard Hughes Corp. CEO David O’Reilly.
Cities such as New York and San Francisco that have large blocks of older, hard-to-lease corporate space and a high cost of living for employees will face tough competition from growing areas of the country, O’Reilly said during a recent appearance on CNBC's “Last Call.”
The Texas-based developer’s projects include three mixed-use communities near Houston and another in Summerlin, a rapidly growing area of Nevada's Las Vegas Valley.
O'Reilly said those areas are drawing people who just want a better life in regions with lower housing costs.
“We just relocated a company from San Diego into the Woodlands” in Texas, the development firm's chief said. “The CEO said they did a survey of their employees, average age 47, 48 years old. The vast majority of them had come to the realization that they couldn’t afford to own a home, ever, in San Diego."
He added that "they didn’t think their children could go to college because they didn’t know if they could get into state school in California.”