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Munich: Europe's best business base Greater Munich is by far number one among Germany's 97 high-tech clusters, states an authoritative study published in September by Prognos. The Swiss market research company gave Munich a score of 69. That was 11 points more than the closest runner up. Munich's score is also ten points more than it received in Prognos' 2001 rankings, which Munich also topped. |
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Prognos used 11 indicators to compile its scores. Among these indicators, the numbers of: research institutes (and the quality of their equipment and work), self-employed professionals, engineers and other highly-qualified personnel, patents received and exploited, and of high-tech start-ups in the respective cluster. |
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These qualities have attracted 695 (as of November, 2002) foreign-owned high-techs to metropolitan Munich. Accounting for 30% of the Germany-wide total and twice as many as five years ago, this number gives Munich the largest foreign high-tech community on the European continent. |
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Many of these companies form part of Munich's life sciences and TIMES ("technology, information, media, entertainment and security) clusters. Both are the largest and most productive in Europe. |
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Once in Munich, these companies increase the size of their staffs and of their operating space at a 10% annual rate. Add in the fact that Munich has the largest number of viable start-ups and self-employed professionals of any German city, and you have the city with the highest rates of job creation and commercial real estate take-up in the country-and lowest rates of unemployment and property vacancies. These rates of growth, in turn, have made the city Germany's largest and healthiest commercial real estate market. Munich has 15.3 million square meters of commercial real estate, states a report released in September, 2002 by DTZ, the international property experts. That's 100,000 square meters more than runner-up Berlin, whose population is three times as large as Munich's. Number three and four in Germany are Hamburg (12 million square meters) and Frankfurt (9.9 million square meters). The same study pegs Munich's vacancy rate at 2.7%. That's the lowest of any major German city-and one of the lowest in the world. No wonder that Munich in early November, 2002 was ranked 'the most attractive market in Germany for real estate investment' by Lasalle Investment Management. That's good news for the investors who have already consigned their capital to Munich. These funds will produce over the next few years a further 1.2 million square meters of commercial space.
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