Brian Suiter: Tech companies come back to town

Google buys 111 8th Ave, a 2.9 million sf building which encompasses an entire block in NYC, for almost $2B, their largest office outside of California. Twitter moves into San Francisco’s mid-market neighborhood. Microsoft expands to 300K sf in Kendall Square in Boston. Google expands into 150K sf mixed use space in Shadyside area of Pittsburgh. Internet based Receivables Exchange sets up shop in New Orleans’ central business district.
These types of headlines have become commonplace in metro area news. Tech companies, once the key players in suburban office parks have started to pull back into urban settings. Long gone are the volley ball fields, seas of surface parking, and manmade lakefront settings. Value has been placed on compact and dense settings for new offices and expansions. Their employees are often young and drawn to urban lifestyles. Why not bring the office to your prospective workforce rather than pulling your workforce to the suburbs from 9am to 5 pm? The aggregations of large offices, at one point in time, were always based in city’s business district. Then there was the mass population and business exodus to the ‘burbs. It seems like things have turned back around again as the population and their accompanying jobs are coming back to the central core of the cities. There will always be the need for the Apples of the world to have their corporate campuses in the suburbs, purely due to size constraints (where are they going to find 100 acres to house 20,000 staffers?!), but this is not mutually exclusive to also having urban hubs. First, the corporate decision makers moved to the ‘burbs. Then their headquarters followed. Now we are seeing a reversal of fortune for the suburbs and their sprawling office parks.

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At The Feil Organization, Brian is responsible for all facets of two new retail developments that encompass 35 acres and 350 thousand square feet of leasable area with budgets that exceed $75 million, in addition to leasing oversight for 400 thousand square feet of retail assets in the southeast. Brian's expertise spans financial and site feasibility analysis; entitlement, permitting and zoning; site design and engineering; and land and air-right sales and acquisitions. You may contact Brian here.