Page 16
— Property Management Quarterly — August 2015
T
he office move almost always
is a bit of a double-edged
sword for property managers.
Currently in metro Denver,
Class A space across most
submarkets gets snapped up quickly,
leaving little vacancy for only short
periods of time. That’s good news for
landlords and property managers on
both sides of the deal.
On the other hand, the entire move
process usually is one of exception-
ally elevated stress even when virtu-
ally every contingency is considered.
By the time property managers jump
into the planning process, tenants
already have endured a long journey.
The move process includes a
seemingly endless space search
with the tenant’s broker, and then
dozens of sets of plans pored over
with the architect. There are furni-
ture meetings, lighting meetings, IT
meetings and construction meet-
ings. There are meetings on top of
meetings. There is an in-house move
committee, the independent move
manager and, perhaps, even a third-
party project manager. So with all
this interlocking management, what
could possibly go wrong?
That’s a rhetorical question, of
course, because something always
goes wrong. However, what’s sur-
prising is how often the most costly
errors emerge from the most unex-
pected places.
An office move becomes almost a
living, breathing thing with innumer-
able moving parts, sometimes a year
or longer before it is scheduled. Its
intricate milestones are even more
critical than the design and con-
struction process, which technically
stops before occu-
pancy. Although
property manag-
ers are themselves
coordinating with
all the involved
parties, the onus
is on the tenant to
engineer the move.
One particularly
astute and exceed-
ingly prepared
local tenant was
confident he had
planned for every
possible eventuality, with the move
only a short jaunt from one down-
town location to another. What
he didn’t plan on was a television
commercial in mid-shoot blocking
the one usable route of entry to the
new building. The entire street was
covered in several feet of fake snow
as a massive pickup truck hauled
a Rockefeller-sized Christmas tree
down Seventeenth Avenue. This was
a sunny day in August, by the way.
Unforeseen circumstance? Abso-
lutely. So should the tenant have
been a bit more diligent regarding
the possibility of summer events
in the city? Of course. While traffic
conditions on any given day cannot
possibly be predicted to the minute,
a major street closure scheduled
by the city for weeks or months in
advance simply cannot be missed.
Similarly, far too often weather
wreaks havoc on office moves. Colo-
rado’s screwy climate frequently
defies even the latest of meteoro-
logical gadgetry. But it’s funny how
often a Broncos fan will check, re-
check and check again the down-
town weather conditions as kickoff
approaches. There are numerous
mobile apps for that.
Snow, hail, wind and rain are com-
mon here, sometimes all in a single
day. An office relocation doesn’t
have to come to a screeching halt to
become a disaster. It frequently only
has to be delayed. Sure, there are
anomalies, like tornadoes. But there
simply is no excuse for a convoy of
moving trucks filled with a tenant’s
valuable office tools to be paralyzed
on Interstate 25 because somebody
in the organization failed to explore
other transportation options.
Interior architects can be an
invaluable resource to the relocation.
The tenant’s architect should have
complete documentation of the new
space, including floor plans and fur-
niture layouts. A very simple, inex-
pensive and effective method used
to ease the pain of identifying work-
station occupants in the new space
is to tack or tape the assigned move
numbers and layouts on the outside
of each space. The furniture movers
are made aware of this and simply
match up the numbered carts or
crates from the old space to the new
one. Mistake-proof, right? Hardly.
One architect’s project manager
delegated that responsibility to an
overworked rookie who rushed
through the task and affixed one
plan to the wrong location, which
subsequently threw off the entire
sequence. The furniture installer
who could have and should have
seen the mistake – and called it in
– simply figured that the architect
must have a reason for this change
in plans and proceeded to incor-
rectly install systems furniture in a
half-dozen offices before somebody
noticed the gaffe. That is an unin-
tended consequence if ever there
was one. But it happens, despite all
the checklists and rules and proto-
cols set in place.
Oversized furniture and equipment
seem to inexplicably fall through the
cracks when planning a relocation.
One tenant had to call in a stone-
mason on the day of the move to
saw in half a 25-foot granite table
because somebody forgot to mea-
sure the elevator cab. Another was
forced to remove a section of the
curtain wall of the new building
and crane in a custom-built Danish
table. Unforeseen? Perhaps, but just
because there was no specific writ-
ten rule for dealing with unusually
large custom tables does not give
license to the absence of common
sense. And yet, it happens, over and
over again.
Property managers are certainly
not infallible. That’s not the point
here. Regardless of all the different
parties involved in the office relo-
cation process, it is nearly impos-
sible for either tenant or landlord to
expect a mistake-free experience.
The irony is that architects, furniture
installers, movers, move managers,
third-party project managers, build-
ing owners and, in general, tenants
and property managers do a mas-
terful job of planning the relocation
down to the last paper clip. It is
what is not on those lists that often
can make the difference between a
smooth relocation and a very bumpy
one.
s
Dan Marschman
Senior project
manager, Kieding,
Denver
Management
