In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” the title character ages backward in time, in a commentary on the human condition.
If the movie script were rewritten as a parable of the local commercial real estate market, the title might become “The Curious Case of 695 East Main Street.”
As General Re Corp. announced plans last year to relocate from the Stamford address it has occupied more than a quarter century, the building”™s ownership group set about an extensive renovation to lure replacement tenants.
Instead, the building continues to empty as leases conclude, according to broker CB Richard Ellis and others, with replacement tenants yet to be revealed. The culprit: the bankruptcy case of Lehman Brothers Holdings through which stakeholder questions have yet to be resolved.
“It”™s tied up with Lehman,” said William Cuddy Jr., an executive vice president with CB Richard Ellis in the brokerage firm”™s Stamford office. “There”™s not much re-leasing activity going on.”
If not a Brad Pitt among Stamford”™s trophy buildings, located at the eastern periphery of downtown Stamford and its central train station, 695 Main St. had enough star quality to serve Gen Re”™s purposes for an extended period. It was good enough also for Royal Bank of Scotland, such that RBS subleased more than 85,000 square feet of space in the building in 2006 as it laid the foundation for its new regional headquarters a block from the train station.
The new RBS building continues to grab attention from prospective tenants seeking premier space in Stamford, but RBS shows no intention at present of subleasing space to other companies.
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“We are getting inquiries on the building,” said Paul Jacobs, another CBRE executive vice president. “The comment from RBS is that the inn is full.”
Not so 695 East Main St. Gen Re is in the process of relocating its Stamford operations from the office to 120 Long Ridge Road, a former General Electric Co. building that became available after GE juggled its Stamford operations in order to take possession of Xerox Corp.”™s former headquarters at 800 Long Ridge Road, a real estate prize GE could not resist.
Gen Re numbers among the largest employers in Fairfield County, reporting 800 employees in Stamford at the height of the economic boom. The state extended $9 million in incentives to help keep it in Stamford.
In the first quarter, Gen Re premiums written dropped 19 percent from a year earlier to under $1.4 billion, and the unit reported a $13 million loss for the period, with parent company Berkshire Hathaway”™s three other divisions reporting profits.
Those results included more than $200 million in premiums from Gen Re assuming net loss reserves from a runoff of a Lloyd”™s syndicate reinsurance contracts from 2000.
The company”™s local operations have been rocked the past few years by a series of fraud convictions of senior executives over a sham transaction orchestrated with New York City-based American International Group Inc. In mid-June, former CEO and Ireland resident John Houldsworth was spared jail time after he testified against four former Gen Re executives, while admitting to committing fraud himself.
Separately, a Delaware judge dismissed a shareholder lawsuit against Gen Re, due largely to the complexity of the case.
As the Lehman case progresses, the curious case of 695 East Main could rejuvenate downtown Stamford ”“ the more vacant office space in the building, the argument goes, the better the odds the city could lure a large, new anchor tenant from New York state ”“ with multiple companies there currently considering Connecticut for 100,000 square feet of space or more, according to Cuddy.
