Welcome to Mobility Minute, a newsletter published every Friday byWorldwide ERC®for the benefit of members and the global mobility and relocation industry. Here's a quick glimpse of what you'll find in this week’s issue:
GBOs Return With Cooling Real Estate Market
Sustainability Around the World
Key Takeaways From GWS 2022
GWERC Holds Summer Educational Meeting
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GBOs Return With Cooling Real Estate Market
The real estate market in the United States now appears to be cooling. According to Realtor.com, homes are no longer being bought quickly, and listing prices have begun to drop. A cooling market might cause an employee to reconsider or delay their relocation. Because of this, organizations are again revisiting the Guaranteed Buyout (GBO) home sale program.
Why is this important?
After two years of an unprecedented real estate market, it is possible that GBOs will again become commonplace in relocations. As relocating employees struggle to sell their homes, organizations need to be prepared to support them. GBOs could be the solution to easing the home-sale process for many relocating employees.
2022 has been a landmark year both for climate change and for sustainability efforts. This year, President Biden signed the most significant climate legislation ever passed, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is aimed at lowering carbon emissions in a variety of sectors, including energy and transportation.
Sustainability is also top of mind for Worldwide ERC®, which works closely with other stakeholders to meet governmental and corporate sustainability goals and advance sustainability in the mobility industry.
Take a look at five examples from countries around the world that have accomplished big strides in sustainability since the start of the year.
Worldwide ERC® CEO and President Lynn Shotwell shares her thoughts on this year’s Global Workforce Symposium (GWS). “It was an amazing opportunity for our industry to come together to get our ‘game on,’” she says. “With over 1,400 global mobility professionals joining us last week, I was absolutely thrilled to have the chance to engage directly with our members, learn more from our industry’s experts and, of course, have fun in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.”
The Greater Washington Employee Relocation Council held an event on 16 August at the Washington Nationals ballpark. Participants met at the stadium in one of the meeting rooms pre-game for an educational session, which included the typical industry updates, along with speaker Thomas Blanford, who works in Congressman Scott Fitzgerald’s office on the Small Business Committee.
A great question came up about H1-B visas that affect mobility. Blanford was asked about any insights he could share on the visas. “What we’ve heard from leadership is that there won’t be any effort to address or expand lawful immigration until we also address illegal immigration and border security,” he said. “With the significant increase in fentanyl overdoses in this country—which come from China into Mexico and then to the U.S.— it’s important to our constituents that we work to combat the rise in illicit fentanyl, and even crime in general, before tackling the issue of lawful immigration.”
GWS 2022 Corporate Strategy & Benchmark Recap | Wednesday, 9 November, noon ET | The Corporate Strategy & Benchmark session at GWS2022 engaged over 260 corporate mobility professionals in deep conversations about issues, challenges, and solutions. Join us for an hour of insights that directly impact our industry.
Fragomen’s Worldwide Immigration Trends Report tracks the changes surrounding the key drivers and themes of immigration policy. The Q2 2022 supplement discusses important current events and how they are shaping the immigration landscape, including the economic downturn, key COVID-19 travel restriction changes, and the state of remote work as it affects mobility and immigration policy.
Global Economic Snapshot
Cultural bereavement is a term coined in 1991 by Dr. Maurice Eisenbruch, a psychiatrist and professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, while interviewing Cambodian refugees. It is more complex than culture shock. Dr. Eisenbruch felt as though he needed more precise vocabulary to capture the refugees’ emotions and mental health; their experiences did not fit neatly under anxiety or depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, he explained in a paper at the time. —The New York Times
Tax reporting requirements have been on the rise, including country-by-country reporting for companies with consolidated gross revenue exceeding $752 million, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development guidance (or similar threshold in participating jurisdictions). — Bloomberg Tax
The labor issues that have plagued so many companies for the past year are just as prevalent, if not more so, in the shipping industry. As in many industries, workers are seeking pay increases to keep up with inflation. Labor actions, including strikes, have taken place in the U.S., U.K., Germany, South Africa, and South Korea. — Fast Company
Tourist havens like Orlando and Oahu are seeing more revenue from taxes levied on overnight hotel stays than their counterparts who rely on business-focused travel. Cities that depend heavily on commercial travel have seen a larger decline in their revenue per available room since the onset of the pandemic, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professors wrote in a draft research paper.
Leisure travel continues to outperform business travel
For example, Boston, which is considered a commercial city, saw a 70% drop in revenue per available room, compared to leisure-focused Phoenix, which saw a 39% decline. The metric the researchers use is an industry standard to measure the strength of revenues across the lodging market.
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