Building and Locational Characteristics’ Quality of Purpose-built Office and their Relationship with Rentals

Purpose-built office (PBO) market in Malaysia has shown positive developments and increasing level of competitiveness. Many characteristics of PBO were unveiled by virtue of recent studies, market demand, technology growth and new guidelines such as office classification, green building and other related sustainable assessment in order to fulfill the property market participants need. As a result, the characteristics of Malaysian’s PBO have become more complex. More importantly, the increasing complexity of characteristics would entail greater needs on their influence on the rental levels of the PBO space. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research in the country that had actually studied in detail the influence of both the building and locational characteristics on rental levels alone in Malaysia. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine the building and locational characteristics of PBO and their relationship with rentals in the Malaysia's office property market. Integral to achieving this objective, various characteristics that cover all fields are grouped under eight categories namely presentation, management, functionality, services, access and circulation, location, green building and amenities. In line with the gap of knowledge in relation to the need to adopt a more consumer oriented approach and the utilisation of high level spatial technology to refine the measurement of variables, quantitative methods namely are Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in combination with Geo-information System (GIS) were used to analyse the importance as well as the quality level of these characteristics. Correlation analysis was also applied to analyse the relationship between these characteristics of PBO and rental. In the context of benefiting from a plethora of variables, Golden Triangle area of Kuala Lumpur was selected to provide data on the PBO.