The unique selling point to lure big firms to SA
South Australia is now coronavirus-free – but our months in lockdown have revealed something else that property experts say could be a huge lure to corporations.
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Our state’s management of the COVID-19 crisis, coupled with low-cost offices and the now-proven ability to work remotely in many industries, provide a strong selling point to attract migrants and head offices, property figures say.
And, they add, we should not only recognise this, but actively market it.
Housing Industry Association executive director SA Stephen Knight, one of a number of influential property sector chiefs surveyed by The Advertiser about the future for the sector after COVID-19, said remote work was clearly here to stay.
“Let’s now expand that to still keeping your well-paid job in Sydney or Melbourne, but living in Adelaide with all the benefits of more affordable housing and no long commutes,” Mr Knight said.
“Government and industry should embark on an advertising campaign squarely aimed at families in the eastern states’ capital cities to lure them to Adelaide.
“An even bigger thought would be to target companies to relocate their manufacturing base and sales team, for example, to SA and still keep their head office in Sydney or Melbourne if necessary.”
BankSA chief executive Nick Reade said offshore processing centres could be targeted to bring them back home – an issue placed centre stage in April when Telstra had to go on a hiring spree because of lockdowns affecting its overseas call centres.
Maras Group chief executive Steve Maras said South Australia’s “safe haven” status should be talked up. “We are a horizontal, not vertical-stacked city, where people do not live all over and on top of each other,’’ Mr Maras said.
Commercial & General managing director Jamie McClurg said in his own business, the costs of operating in Adelaide were “40 per cent less than the closest other state office cost we incur per head of staff’’, and with remote work now proven, we should market this as a feature.
“From a property perspective, South Australia has always represented a safe pair of hands,’' he said.
“That’s even truer today and it begs the question – why not consider Adelaide as a head-office location or a diversified or decentralised model of staffing?’’
One of the keys to capitalising on the opportunity would be enabling technology.
Mr Reade said we should look to “create a technology infrastructure advantage around speed and the ease of doing business from South Australia’’, while Harris Real Estate managing director Phil Harris suggested SA invested in more data-centre capacity, and seeks to become a cybersecurity hub.
SA film company stays in sync
While the global film and TV industry went into a pandemic slowdown, Adelaide innovative software firm Cospective has not missed a beat.
After its Glenside office flooded three years ago, Cospective met the challenge and managed to operate as normal.
“In a way, we had tested for the COVID-19-like closure,” Cospective chief executive Rory McGregor told The Advertiser. “Our customers didn’t know any different and didn’t lose a minute.”
Cospective, which specialises in licensing its remote collaboration software for the film and TV content industry, is one of the few SA companies to thrive.
Its core product cineSync is a software application used by production, post-production and visual-effects companies around the world to review and approve high resolution in sync. The software will play in key role in upcoming films Marvel’s Black Widow and Thor: Love and Thunder, Walt Disney’s Jungle Cruise and James Bond thriller No Time to Die.
“We’ve been helping remote collaboration for years with some foresight and planning, including decentralising our servers across the US, UK and here in Australia,” Mr McGregor said.
“While the whole industry in LA went home to isolate, visual artists around the world still had work to do and contracts to finish.”