For at least the last year, every time I call up a commercial broker to talk about office leasing, I’ve been hearing the same story — tenants want buildings on transit.

It’s been anecdotal until now, but one company decided to do a more thorough analysis about those preferences and found that it’s more than anecdotal. My story here looks at some of the patterns that Jones Lang Lasalle found. As well, I talked to employers like Fluor Canada and Horizon Distributors about their decisions on where to locate.

(I also called Nokia, and got this strange message back from them, which I didn’t understand until today’s announcement about layoffs: “What I can tell you, is that our R&D operations in Burnaby is an important part of Nokia’s R&D network with some unique skills and responsibilities especially for 3^rd party application development and Nokia Store.”)

This also bolsters the argument that I got recently from a Vancouver land analyst, who said people resisting paying additional taxes to invest in new TransLink rapid-transit projects are cutting off their own noses. Those investments will get paid back many times over by the increase in land value around them, he said, as well as reducing some of the development pressure in the parts of the city that are currently transit rich.