2 months ago
22
With the apparent downswing in the outsourcing industry, real estate developer Stanley Motta Limited, which once targeted that market, has rented space on its new 11-storey office tower to a mix of tenants, including a government entity, to reduce its dependence on any one sector.
Stanley Motta Chairman and CEO Melanie Subratie said the new US$12-million building located at the company’s 58HWT complex, on Half Way Tree Road in Kingston, will increase the rentable space by 40 per cent to 300,000 square feet of office space.
“The building is complete; the tenants are doing fit outs and design work at the moment. It is tenanted, except for one floor which is free,” said Subratie. “We have some reliable tenants with good credit ratings,” she reported to shareholders at Stanley Motta’s annual general meeting on Thursday.
Tenants in the new tower include Productive Business Solutions Limited and a government entity, which will occupy two floors each, as well as various other companies which have taken space. Both Productive Business and Stanley Motta are members of the Musson Group, a large privately held conglomerate, of which Subratie is deputy chairman.
The tenants are about to move into the new building, and Stanley expects to start booking income from it by the first quarter of 2025, Subratie said.
The newly developed property features two levels of secure parking, 10 levels of office space, water harvesting, backup water and electricity generation systems.
Subratie reported that none of the space in the new building has been rented to any firm in the outsourcing sector, alternatively referred to as business process outsourcing, or the global services sector, depending on the technical level of the outsourcing service provided.
Commenting on the future of the global services sector, Subratie said: “A lot of this is going to be up to the government to enact policies to make sure that Jamaica is as competitive with all of the other jurisdictions that are competitive … . We have to have an educated workforce and policies to do with taxes, expenses, work from home and security expenses that would have increased in Jamaica relative to other markets in the region.”
One of the signs of the downturn in the market came to light this week when the Financial Gleaner reported that one of the largest outsourcing firms operating in Jamaica, Ibex, had closed down two of its six contact centres and eliminated 1,600 workstations.
Stanley Motta is a revived business that relaunched as a real estate developer and went public in 2018. Its initial target market for tenants was the BPO sector, with outsourcing firm Alorica taking up space at the 58HWT tech park after its first new building was commissioned.
The real estate developer currently generates annual revenue of half-billion dollars. Profit last year topped $1.7 billion – double that of the previous year’s profit – due to fair value gains of $1.5 billion on its investment properties.
In its most recent financial report to June 2024, the company’s assets were valued at more than $10 billion, while its net worth topped $7.7 billion. Profit at half-year was down from $146 million to $131 million, despite an uptick in revenue from $262 million to $282 million.
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