CREJ - Property Management Quarterly - August 2015
The 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 exceptionally elevated stress even when virtually 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 furniture meetings, lighting meetings, IT meetings and construction meetings. 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 surprising is how often the most costly errors emerge from the most unexpected places. An office move becomes almost a living, breathing thing with innumerable moving parts, sometimes a year or longer before it is scheduled. Its intricate milestones are even more critical than the design and construction process, which technically stops before occupancy. Although property managers are themselves coordinating with all the involved parties, the onus is on the tenant to engineer the move. One particularly astute and exceedingly prepared local tenant was confident he had planned for every possible eventuality, with the move only a short jaunt from one downtown 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? Absolutely. 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. Colorado’s screwy climate frequently defies even the latest of meteorological gadgetry. But it’s funny how often a Broncos fan will check, recheck and check again the downtown weather conditions as kickoff approaches. There are numerous mobile apps for that. Snow, hail, wind and rain are common 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 furniture layouts. A very simple, inexpensive and effective method used to ease the pain of identifying workstation 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 incorrectly install systems furniture in a half-dozen offices before somebody noticed the gaffe. That is an unintended consequence if ever there was one. But it happens, despite all the checklists and rules and protocols 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 stonemason on the day of the move to saw in half a 25-foot granite table because somebody forgot to measure 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 written 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 relocation process, it is nearly impossible 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, building owners and, in general, tenants and property managers do a masterful 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.