The third edition of Savills' annual Tech Cities report is now out. Savills is a global real estate company headquartered in London and a few years ago they started looking and what makes a successful "tech city." As always, you should take these rankings with a healthy dose of scepticism. But this one is based on over 100 individual metrics across 6 main categories:

• Business environment (such as the size of the financial services industry)

• Tech environment (such as the amount of inward VC investment)

• City buzz and wellness (is it a cool place to live?)

• Talent Pool (is the city creating and attracting young/smart talent?)

• Real estate costs

• Urban mobility

Here are the top 30 cities for tech and startup companies:

New York takes the top spot, supposedly because of its deep talent pool and position as one of if not the capital the world. But my friends in the Bay Area tell me that their housing shortage is also starting to impact SF's tech dominance.

Generally, the report finds that the above "tech cities" should see their GDP rise by 36% over the next decade, compared to 19% for other developed cities. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with tech, but the above list does differ from what you'd see in a more conventional global cities index. Here you have Austin ahead of global cities such as Hong Kong. And you have Toronto ahead of cities like Tokyo and Paris.

One takeaway that shouldn't come as a surprise to readers of this blog is the rise of Chinese cities in the index. Beijing is ahead of New York, London, and San Francisco by a wide margin in terms of annual VC investment. And Chinese cities as a whole are starting to take a greater share of global VC dollars (second chart below).

If you'd like to download a PDF of the full report, you can do that here.

Image: Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash