Reprint - Choyce Peterson

FAIRFIELD COUNTY
BUSINESS JOURNAL
robpennerphotography.com
New ‘silhouette’ tables depict vacancies
Alan Peterson and John Hannigan, principals with Choyce Peterson.
BY ALEXANDER SOULE
casoule@westfairinc.com
C
ome 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-byfloor 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
FAIRFIELD COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL • SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
robpennerphotography.com
John Hannigan and Alan Peterson, principals with Choyce Peterson, review an office vacancy chart.
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.
For more information or to schedule a
meeting contact:
FAIRFIELD COUNTY BUSINESS JOURNAL • SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
John P. Hannigan
(203) 961-8175
jhannigan@choycepeterson.com
Alan R. Peterson
(203) 961-8170
apeterson@choycepeterson.com