MEXICO .- The first to realize the advantages of the home office was Austreberto Miquirray . As a partner and president of the board of directors of High Quality Constructions for Mexican Development, he had to make health decisions in the midst of the pandemic and minimize physical presence in the offices.
This is how he stayed, locked in an apartment in Mexico City that was very expensive, somewhat alone, only in contact with family and without seeing friends for fear of contagion COVID- 19 , at a disadvantage because he was barely fighting the battle against cancer.
– Why am I still here if I can be anywhere? – he wondered.
And he was not the only one. Over time, housing finance companies discovered that, because companies in the country chose to change their work schemes to teleworking models, Mexicans have thought better about where they want to live.
Bernardo Silva, CEO of Yave, focused on housing finance, confirms it with hard data: the pandemic opened the way for many inhabitants to move from the country’s labor epicenter what has been the Mexico City .
“The main places where we are seeing that the The people who have applied for financing are Querétaro, Mérida, the Riviera Maya, Baja California Sur, Los Cabos and Guadalajara, in these regions they have demanded a lot of credit from us “, he explained.
” They are beginning to seek to make an investment in real estate far from the Mexican capital, both in new metropolitan cities and in others that have the beach as their main attraction. ”
Autreberto Miquirray first moved to Cuernavaca, 90 kilometers from Mexico City, to a larger space of his own , a house with a garden and a better climate (for something they call it the city of eternal spring) and office expenses were greatly reduced.
Soon his son joined, which is the current president of the business group, and made Cuernavaca their center of operations while the workers went to their respective homes.
As managers, from the state of Morelos they coordinated the work schedules of Mexico City, Baja California and Quintana Roo, where they have works in progress.
” I realized that I no longer need large offices, because in CDMX the number of employees in the office was substantially reduced, because they also do home office, in whole or in part ”, he says. “There were office premises that we closed outright or moved to other much smaller sites.”
The International Labor Organization (ILO) recently estimated that 3% of workers in Latin America were working at home in 2019; the figure increased by 2020 to 20% of employees.
In the case of Mexico, the Regional Survey 2020: How was the work and family environment transformed ?, led by the IAE Business School, detailed that prior to the pandemic only 34% worked remotely full time and 10% some days of the week, while during this stage the figure increased to 68%.
The study observed that Mexicans also stood out regionally because a 84% of the people, even with the emergency, have liked to live the experience of teleworking.
Austreberto Miquirray believes that they will keep the home office “as much as possible” unless the growth of the economy presents them with circumstances that force them to modify this strategy again, “but I think that the m we will focus on the fundamentals. ”
In the midst of the pandemic, Constructions of High Quality for Mexican Development discovered that the growth in the demand for construction on the beaches was increasing for several reasons: because tourism, although declining, is still standing and due to the removal of workers for hotels and home offices.
“We already had investments in Baja California and Tulum but now we see that there is more demand and we are going to take construction opportunities to meet the housing needs both for income and for sale ”, he specifies. “In a few days I will move to Tulum.”
The challenges
Bernardo Silva, CEO of Yave, explains this population movement in the COVID Era – 19 as follows: the average amount of financing granted to people ranges between two million pesos (about 100,000 Dollars) and up to five million (about 250, 000 dollars) and they are asking for it for cities with other attractions in the quality of life.
“The trend that will take place, at least for the remainder of this year and the next, is that Mexicans acquire homes in other places that previously did not predominate in the granting of financing” .
In Querétaro, for example, the local director of the Mexican Association of Real Estate Professionals, said that in the state, a neighbor of the capital, such a Mexican, in the last years around two million people came from the CDMX in search of housing.
“It is due to proximity to the capital of the country, but less saturation; bigger homes and lower prices ”, he said.
The challenge now lies for the Mexican capital and other cities that have hitherto been powerful due to their retention of human capital such as Monterrey and Guadalajara. The three main markets in the country will suffer a decline in demand from the office real estate sector in recent months, according to the report Panorama of the office real estate market of the company Datoz.
“There are We have to remember that the hybrid telework model is here to stay and office vacancies will continue ”, said Sergio Mireles, director of Datoz.
Nothing is forever
Despite the reality of the mobilizations for teleworking and for which the businessman Austreberto Miquirray is moving to the Riviera Maya, he believes that, in the long run, his company will reconsider the Homeworking model.
What he observes is that employees have lower performance and there is no guarantee that the employee will commit all his time in the part of work that corresponds to him. He says that it is more difficult to supervise them, that they may not have adequate working conditions uadas and there is no healthy separation between the world of work, family, social commitments …
“If you do not have all the conditions you need to develop your job -what is the case? of most Mexican households-will eventually enter into crisis. ”
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