A quick tour of an historic home

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Seven Proven Strategies to Fill Vacant Office Spaces in Dying Downtowns

Have you started to notice more vacancies in your local office buildings and strip shopping centers?

If you watched one of my latest YouTube videos, you will see me in front of a vacant office/warehouse building that is 720,000 SF. It used to be a major distribution plant for K B Toys before they went out of business in NJ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEH3u7XgS7s

How can we fill our vacant offices in our dying downtowns?

That was the subject that I spoke about last Monday at this year’s Main Street Forum. Although my new book, The Designed Office, will give you invaluable tips on how to find the best office space for your business needs, give you critical design principals to have your architect/engineers/interior designers to follow, how to build-out your new office space on time and within your budget, and many other maintenance and “green” ideas, you won’t hear much from my book when reviewing the DVD of my Main Street Forum talk, “Making Your Work Place Work for You.”

Instead, I spoke about the changes of our economy, challenge the notion that “green” design is of any benefit to the tenant or to the landlord, and I give some strategies that towns can begin to implement now to boost the sales and leases of their commercial real estate within their central business districts.

Here are seven strategies that towns can implement to help reduce vacancies in their downtowns:

1. Create a safe environment. If people have any reason to fear of their safety, any other strategy will not help fill vacancies.

2. Don’t have a blocked up Main Street that forces drivers to park their cars behind the commercial district while creating a pedestrian mall where Main Street once existed. This might have worked successfully in a couple of places in American, but for the most part, the result of this urban experiment was a disaster. People just found other places to shop.

3. Follow the LEED requirements for Existing Buildings if possible. My talk will illustrate how building owners have filled their office buildings faster than their competition while increasing the value of their building’s bottom line.

4. Have a nice variety of stores and offices that compliments, does not compete, and surrounds an anchor store or industry.

5. Resist having Real Estate offices in prime locations of the CBD. Real Estate offices can often afford to lease or own prime downtown real estate. But when they do, they attract on time shoppers who are not interested in mingling around the downtown shops over and over again. They are there to only buy a home that is not even located in the central business district.

6. Have a good partnership between the local government officials and the private sector (merchants, residents, civic groups, corporations). For example, if you have townspeople who have lived there all of their lives and don’t want change while also having young and up-in-coming professionals who want to transform the town, you will be constantly in conflict while the vacancies continue to climb.

7. Good Ambiance. The Main Street must have a soul. This can be done with landscaping, events, sidewalk cafes, street lights, historical references, plenty of parking, and the use of our Experience Architecture design philosophy.

If you would like a copy of the DVD, just email me at info@LaneArchitecture.net to inquire about it.

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Recession Relief

What can we do to fill all of these vacancies in commercial properties that we see popping up everywhere? This video will steer you in the right direction.



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Increase Profits Even During the Recession!

With the current recession, we really need an edge with our commercial real estate investments. I found some really cool ways to increase profits within our offices and wrote the book about it. Check it out at http://www.MyDesignedOffice.com.

If you can't wait to get your hands on your copy of this book, just click on the book icon at the top of the right column of this blog.

By the way, there are a dozen fee bonus items that you really need to see at that web site. Go now!

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Adaptive Reuse

When you are holding on a commercial property and can't find a buyer for it, what are your other opitions?

One of them is to propose a different use for the building.

Check with the zoning department in the town that the building is in. There, you will find out what uses are allowed for that property. You can also find other buildings of the same zone designation and learn what uses are allowed in the city that are not listed in the zoning books.

For example, there is a building in Union, NJ that was built in the early 1980's. Its original use was a office/warehouse for office furniture and office equipment. After some research, it was found that medical related uses were attractive to the locale zoning board. So, the commercial realtor contacted our office to help them illustrate to their potential clients how a health/wellness center would look within its walls.

Here is a before and after of just one of the interior areas for the warehouse area. There will be more images that will be posted on future blogs of this property.



This is a photo of the existing warehouse area. Notice the location of the columns on both the photo and the rendering. This is how you can match to two images.



This is a proposed lap pool in the existing warehouse. The wall to the right is all glass with water flowing down it to create a translucent barrier between the adjacent muscel machine room. Descriptive words such as uplifting, empowering, motion, health, and healing are just some of the experiences that a user of this space is to enjoy. This is an example of what Experience Architecture design philosphy is all about.

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Seven Ways for Offices to Thrive

With businesses struggling during this recession, we are now finding a staggering increase in vacancies in office spaces. In Manhattan, space that tenants have put on the market for sublease more than doubled last year to 8.2 million square feet. According to Reis Inc., a New York-based real estate research firm, there was an increase of 14.4 percent of office vacancies throughout the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2008. This is the highest in three years.

Two Bloomberg reporters, Peter S. Green and David M. Levitt wrote this quote in one of their most recent articles:
“This quarter was like no other quarter we’ve ever seen before,” said Joseph Harbert, chief operating officer of Cushman’s New York metro region, in an interview. “It’s as if someone let the helium out of the balloon. The downfall of Lehman really changed the real estate consumer’s psychology, and put everyone in a cautious, wait-and-see, don’t-make-a-decision attitude.”

Unemployment continues to rise. It is expected that 175,000 jobs will be lost in Manhattan. Many are from the financial industry.

People are finding that many of their co-workers are now gone. And they are wondering if they are next in line during the next wave of layoffs.

Fear sets in and productivity begins to decrease.

Now is the best time for companies to assess their strengths and challenges in order to come out on top from this recession.

Here are 7 tips for companies to use that will boost their productivity and save them money:

1. Save on the energy costs by subdividing unused areas from active work stations. The heating bills can be reduced by locating open plan work stations near perimeter radiant heating units during the cold seasons.

2. Individual offices are great for privacy. But, they often require their own variable air volume control for the air conditioning. They also require more light fixtures per square foot than open plan office spaces because there is a more efficient distribution of lumens in the open areas. You can save a bit on your energy bill by reducing the number of individual offices.

3. Having vacant desks scattered between occupied desks sends a strong and negative message to the office workers. “That is where my office mate used to sit, will I be next to go?” Get rid of empty office spaces by relocating office workers so they are located closer together.

4. Share common areas such as libraries and file rooms. Sublet the excess and redundant areas.

5. Reduce the number of coffee break rooms by combining their use with other departments. Get rid of excess kitchenettes by subletting them out with the unused office spaces.

6. Digitize old paper documents. Dispose of obsolete documents by storing them off-site or by shredding them.

7. Hire an architect to record where all of your desks, files, chairs, etc. exists. They can draw this on a floor plan that allows you to just click on a space and read who is in that space, the condition of each piece of furniture, and the function of that space. This is the best time to get a clear picture of what should be kept and what needs to be removed or replaced.

It is wise to be cautious during these challenging times. Your competitors will probably remain in the “wait-and-see, don’t-make-a-decision” mode. This is the perfect time to do just the opposite by getting your office to work more efficient than ever before.

Call us at 212-594-2007 to learn more about how your company can thrive in these times.