Business Insights | Redefining Grade A Offices in Singapore: How to Attract and Retain Tier 1 Tenants

By Fiona Alexander, Head of Workplace Strategy, Southeast Asia

Redefining Grade A: A strategic shift

Historically, Grade A meant a prestigious address, efficient floorplates, strong transport connectivity, and high-quality building systems.  Today, leading occupiers are asking a different question, will this building help us attract, engage and retain talent?

For many Tier 1 occupiers, workplace experience has become a strategic business decision rather than a real estate decision.  The most successful buildings are those that respond to this shift.

What can Landlords review to potentially upgrade to attract tier 1 tenants? Employees increasingly compare their office experience not with another office, but with premium hospitality environments, including concierge-style services, curated arrival experiences, premium lounges, wellness-focused lobbies, and frictionless digital access.

Occupiers also increasingly seek access to spaces they cannot justify economically to provide within their own tenancy.  Shared innovation hubs, client presentation suites, event spaces, podcast studios, town hall spaces, and executive meeting facilities are examples of facilities used regularly but not daily, and therefore not cost effective to have as permanent features of their office space. Shared facilities offered by the landlord allows tenants to reduce internal fit-out costs while offering a broader workplace experience.

Tier 1 tenants are increasingly asking for end-of-trip facilities, premium gyms, wellness rooms, outdoor terraces, biophilic design, healthy food offerings, and indoor air quality monitoring.  Wellness is shifting from a nice to have feature to a core component of workplace value and experience.

Forward-thinking landlords are already investing in occupancy analytics, visitor experience platforms, workplace apps, smart booking systems, and indoor environmental quality monitoring.  The next frontier is using workplace intelligence to demonstrate how buildings support employee performance and collaboration.

The focus is to build an ecosystem, not just a building. The strongest-performing assets increasingly function as mixed-use ecosystems, where employees can access work, food, fitness, healthcare, social spaces, and attend community events.  Buildings that become part of employees’ daily routines create stronger tenant stickiness.

Some of the most successful landlords curate amenities that enhance the office experience, such as specialty coffee, premium fitness, convenience retail, health services, and lifestyle offerings. Their goal is to deliver maximum workplace value and experience.

Leading landlords also increasingly activate buildings through networking events, wellness programs, thought leadership sessions, tenant appreciation activities, and cultural events. The building becomes a community platform rather than simply leased space.

Many occupiers face significant uncertainty around growth and workplace utilization. Landlords who offer expansion options, swing space, managed office solutions and flexible workspace partnerships are often viewed as lower-risk real estate partners.

Landlords have extensive data about buildings but often limited insight into how people actually experience them. The next generation of premium assets will combine:

• Occupancy data
• Workplace sentiment
• Environmental data
• Amenity usage
• Journey mapping

This enables landlords to make evidence-based decisions about where investment creates the greatest tenant value.

How effectively does this building support business performance?

The most successful CBD buildings of the next decade will not be the ones with the highest specifications. They’ll be the ones that create the strongest connection between workplace experience, talent attraction, and business performance. Landlords are no longer competing building against building. They are competing experience against experience.

How CBRE’s Workplace Strategy Can Help

As the market shifts from real estate to workplace platform, aligning how space is designed, used, and experienced with evolving occupier expectations has become increasingly important.

The Workplace Strategy team at CBRE, part of Singapore Consulting, helps organizations create workplaces that improve employee experience, business performance, and real estate value.

This includes:

• Workplace Strategy – defining how people should work in the future (hybrid, office attendance, collaboration models)
• Occupancy & Utilization Analytics – measuring how space is actually used through data and AI insights
• Employee Experience – improving wellbeing, engagement, culture, and attraction/retention through workplace design
• Change Management – helping employees adapt to new offices, technologies and ways of working
• Portfolio Strategy – reducing costs, optimizing footprints, and aligning real estate with business goals
• Design & Project Advisory – translating strategy into physical environments
• Smart Workplace Technology – integrating booking systems, sensors, workplace apps, AI and digital experiences
• Sustainability & ESG – creating healthier, lower-carbon workplaces
• Facilities & Operations Integration – connecting FM operations with workplace experience and performance data
• Workplace Transformation – supporting mergers, relocations, return-to-office strategies and organizational change

In a flight-to-quality market, these capabilities help ensure that workplace strategy and building performance are aligned with what Tier 1 tenants increasingly expect from premium office environments.

Speak with our Workplace Strategy team today about how your workplace and building performance can better support tenant expectations.