Come late November, it will be easy enough to spot the occupied offices of Stamford, simply by looking at the lighted floors of various buildings as darkness gathers on the commute home.
For companies hunting for a new home that need to know now where the vacancies lie ”“ not to mention landlords assessing the competition ”“ a Stamford company can shed a little light on the matter.
Choyce Peterson, a commercial real estate broker with a Stamford office, has begun publishing semiannual “silhouette” vacancy charts of major office buildings in lower Fairfield County, illustrating available space on a floor-by-floor basis on a two-foot by three-foot poster.
Covering the largest multi-tenant office buildings in Stamford, Greenwich and Norwalk, the free charts are color coded to reflect direct vacancies, subleases and future availability in spaces where leases are set to expire. While not showing all the office buildings in the cities, the tables are intended to give prospective tenants an overall feel for the availabilities in each city.
“These are the buildings that ”˜make”™ the market,” said Alan Peterson, a principal with Choyce Peterson.
The charts instantly reveal some truths that are obvious to insiders like real estate brokers, but perhaps less so to tenants new to the market. For instance, while downtown Stamford”™s vacancy rate is officially about 25 percent, the Choyce Peterson charts show two big reasons why ”“ bright yellow splotches that depict large, empty office buildings at 695 E. Main St. and 1 Harbor Point. The former was the home of General Reinsurance Corp. and available only recently; the latter is still under construction.
The charts also show clusters of vacancies in occupied buildings that can raise questions for would-be tenants on the relative merits or problems with specific buildings, whether due to amenities, location, lease rates, or another reason.
Commercial real estate brokerage companies have long had access to online and printed materials from independent vendors like San Francisco-based LoopNet Inc. and Bethesda, Md.-based CoStar Group Inc. to help them publish listings and crunch data for reports. That can help them compete with large brokers like CB Richard Ellis and Cushman & Wakefield, which maintain sophisticated in-house research and graphic capabilities.
It is hard work, according to Rich Boyle, CEO of LoopNet, who discussed the company”™s approach in a July conference call.
“There are segments of the industry where we do proactively gather listings information ourselves, ”¦ but most of it is still user-generated in the beginning,” Boyle said. “However, we”™ve always had a substantial operation internally. It”™s more leveraged on technology than it is just simply throwing bodies at it, but to then standardize and organize and cleanse and qualify that information, ”¦ there is a lot of work that goes into making it good information that then synchronizes back to a specific building and ties up all the other information we have about that building. And that”™s a process that we are doing more of than we used to do.”
For its part, Choyce Peterson already offers interactive tools on its website such as calculators to help tenants deduce how much space they need (“space is money,” the company”™s slogan proclaims). Those tools also include an “employee map” to help companies pinpoint the most central location for a facility based on where their employees live; and a “report card” to help tenants evaluate their existing lease.
The company also publishes “radius” reports in tabular format that show available suites of 5,000 square feet or more near target locations, for instance train stations in Stamford and Greenwich.
“If you know that within a half mile of where you are there are twenty-five 5,000-square-foot spaces available, ”¦ we think this is helpful from a negotiating perspective,” Peterson said.
Peterson said he knows of only one other company in the Northeast producing a report similar to the silhouette studies it is now publishing: Richards Barry Joyce & Partners L.L.C. in Boston, which publishes a range of statistical and pictorial reports.
Choyce Peterson principal John Hannigan said it is likely the company will also produce such a chart for parts of Westchester County, N.Y., likely covering White Plains and areas east such as Rye Brook. The company has no immediate plans to extend the tables to other municipalities in Fairfield County like Danbury or Shelton.
