_Cremorne emerges Melbourne's tech heartland
In the late 1970’s and early 1980s, Silicon Valley in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California started to become known as a centre for technology and innovation. Thirty years on the area is home to more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000 and boasts mega tech brands such as Apple, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Google.
Today, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean a new Silicon Valley (“Silicon Yarra”) is emerging, in the small Melbourne suburb of Cremorne. Nestled within the broader boundary of Richmond, Cremorne has always had an element of commercial activity, however its popularity as an office hub has taken off in the last few years, with Australia’s biggest online brands – REA Group (realestate.com.au), carsales.com.au, Uber, and soon-to-be SEEK – calling Cremorne home.
The recent completion of several new residential apartment buildings in neighbouring Richmond and South Yarra has fuelled a demand for commercial enterprise, and in turn coworking operators, creative and tech start-ups and SMEs have set up shop along Cremorne’s narrow back streets, attracted by its urban-chic architecture, quality amenity and proximity to the CBD.
Despite being geographically a small suburb, Cremorne plays host to a vibrant mix of tenants both large or small, corporate and non-corporate. Major global names such as Tesla and Disney are housed within a corporate park along the bustling Church Street, while copious smaller businesses inhabit the area’s various side streets and laneways.
The incredible evolution of Cremorne from obscure fringe suburb to leading suburban office destination is such that prime net face rents in the suburb have risen by an amazing 88% over the last 4 years. To put this in perspective, rents in the city’s burgeoning CBD have risen by 37% over the same period.
And the best is yet to come for Cremorne, with in excess of 80,000 sqm of new office development underway, headlined by new headquarters for SEEK and the redevelopment of The Malt District.