As a trio of buildings takes shape at Building & Land Technology”™s Harbor Point development in Stamford, the city”™s commercial real estate community remains confounded over the identity of a phantom tenant BLT says would occupy a fourth building, which it recently won approval to construct.
At a mid-October meeting of the Stamford planning board, outgoing Mayor Dan Malloy said a corporate tenant is interested in obtaining some 250,000 square feet of office space at Harbor Point, as first reported by the Stamford Advocate.
Malloy did not identify the tenant by name, but said the city should ram through Norwalk-based BLT”™s plans to build an office complex twice that size to accommodate what Malloy said was a short time-frame required by the prospective anchor tenant, while providing additional space for smaller businesses.
That has set off a flurry of speculation as to the identity of BLT”™s mystery tenant, and why it is in such a hurry to get a hold of a large amount of space. At deadline, BLT had not returned a call for comment placed with Paul Kuehner, chief operating officer.
BLT has a history of filling the buildings it constructs, most recently in the case of The Towers, a Norwalk complex that attracted the headquarters operations of Xerox Corp., Diageo North America and the GE Commercial Finance division of General Electric Co. To land GE, BLT went to the extent of securing approval for and building a helicopter landing pad atop one of the Towers for use by GE executives.
Â
Fairfield-based GE has since leased Xerox”™s former headquarters in Stamford, now owned by BLT, for its GE Energy Financial Services division. A year ago, after BLT had completed the acquisition of that building and others in Stamford, BLT CEO Carl Kuehner III said in a newsletter that his company expected several Fortune 500 companies to consider the properties when their leases expire this year, without providing further details.
Â
As first reported by the Fairfield County Business Journal last month, brokers have said that both Scotiabank and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. have recently scouted Stamford as a relocation site for operations currently in New York, with neither company confirming any such plans.
Those brokers doubt that either company would be a candidate for the office building BLT has in mind, which would take at least a few years to build.
Multiple brokers said they do not have the foggiest who BLT”™s prospective tenant could be, according to one broker who asked not to be identified by name, an unusual circumstance given the extensive prospecting corporate site selection teams perform before deciding on a major relocation.
While a Fairfield County-based company would not require such services, fewer than 20 corporate employers in the county have the 1,000 workers that would require that much space. At least a few of those already occupy trophy buildings in Stamford, like Pitney Bowes Inc., UBS AGÂ and Royal Bank of Scotland PLC, while others fit the profile of Stratford-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., which do not have the need for office space in an expensive district.
Â
Gartner Inc., which at last report had more than 700 workers at offices in Stamford and Trumbull, this year accepted state incentives to expand its local operations by at least 300 more workers, but brokers said it was an unlikely candidate for the BLT building.
Â
The most intriguing prospect could be GE itself, which in the past three years has been juggling its local offices even as it overhauls its overall business model. Because GE is already a tenant at multiple office buildings, the argument goes, it would be in a position to speak directly with BLT ownership without the commercial real estate brokerage community getting wind of the discussions.
If GE is interested in space in downtown Stamford, such a move could temper any immediate big-bang potential for the project, as the building would not immediately serve to pull a large number of jobs into Stamford and by extension Fairfield County from New York City or another locale.
But on the other hand, it could make available other attractive GE properties freed up by a GE relocation for use by other companies, whether based here or elsewhere. And it could function as a landing pad for future jobs growth by the conglomerate, whether the result of new hiring, acquisitions or transfers.
