Category Archives: Business Recruitment

Quick Stats Website Pages

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An essential part of a successful business recruitment program is making it easy for “walk-in” prospects to find the information they want about your downtown and its available business locations. Today, the first thing that these potential walk-ins probably do is conduct an information search on the Internet, looking at the websites of the municipality and local economic development organizations. Unfortunately, too many of these websites do not provide the information these business prospects need or they have it buried so many layers down that it is hard to find. The result is that many tenant prospects are turned off by their frustrating search experience and they then shift their attention to other communities where they can easily find the information they need.

DANTH, Inc.’s Quick Stats Website Pages can help your organization remedy this situation by:

  • Assembling the types of information downtown business prospects are most likely to look for, whether they are professional corporate site locators or small independent operators
  • Creating a single summary Quick Stats webpage where essential information points (e.g., population, income, office workers, parking, cinema patrons, traffic counts, etc.) are provided and can be quickly digested
  • Providing links on the summary Quick Stats page where the prospect can go to obtain more detailed information about a particular point
  • Providing types of useful information that goes beyond the usual census data and cannot be obtained easily elsewhere
  • Providing a “how to” guide for small independent operators
  • Formulating and providing your downtown’s business location value proposition.

You can view the Quick Stats Page we did for the Morristown Partnership here.

A Quick Stats project is affordable and provides a big bang for your buck. For more information, contact David Milder at 718-805-9507 or [email protected].

Right Fit Your Downtown Retail: Adapting to the new normal for downtown retail

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There’s a New Normal for Downtown Retail
Today, it is essential for downtown developers, landlords, economic development organizations and local elected officials to recognize and adapt to the new normal that has emerged for downtown retailing. Consumer behavior has changed significantly – they are buying less, more deliberately and increasingly online.

The demand for downtown retail space has changed accordingly. Chains are looking for fewer and smaller spaces, while developing smaller formats for entry into new market areas. The strategic importance of small merchants has increased, but their success is still tied to finding affordable rents and adequate financing. Many downtowns now have significantly more retail space than they can fill.

Downtown Leaders and Investors Need to Adapt
More than ever it is essential for downtown leaders and investors to respond effectively to the questions of how much and which types of retail can be attracted to fill vacant storefronts or the street-level spaces of new mixed-use projects.

To be of value and use, it is critical that these answers be informed not only by traditional retail market research techniques, but also by relevant experience and a full understanding of retailing’s new normal.

DANTH, Inc. Is Uniquely Positioned to Help
DANTH, Inc is uniquely positioned to provide its clients with a downtown retail strategy and action plan that is consistent with the market trends of the new normal.

For municipalities, DANTH’s analysis will provide market information that will enable better overall mixed use redevelopment planning, identify the retail that is most sustainable, and establish a plan of action for recruiting viable downtown retail and experienced downtown developers.

For developers, DANTH’s analysis will right size the retail for their new downtown redevelopment projects which will help eliminate overbuilt retail space. In addition, DANTH will provide a list of viable tenant prospects that are right for their development. With years of experience, DANTH will provide the crucial support necessary to ease the local redevelopment approval process.

Our Right Fit Team
DANTH, Inc. is proud to announce that Michael Fabrizio has joined our Right Fit team. Michael has many years of downtown redevelopment and revitalization experience. As Executive Director of the Morristown Partnership, he worked with real estate development companies to generate interest and investment in redevelopment projects in Morristown. He worked with the Town of Morristown to establish and implement multiple redevelopment projects throughout the central business district worth nearly $600 million. He has served as a Commissioner on the Morristown Redevelopment Agency and is a licensed New Jersey Real Estate agent.

Michael joins David Milder, DANTH’s president and founder, on our Right Fit team. David has developed effective niche-based downtown retail revitalization strategies, business recruitment campaigns and redevelopment programs for downtowns across the nation. He is nationally recognized for his leading edge research and writings on the new normal for downtown retail. In New Jersey, his clients have included SIDS/BIDS in Bayonne, Cranford, Elizabeth, Englewood, Morristown, and Washington Borough. Elsewhere they include: the 34th Street Partnership, the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, and the City of White Plains in NY: the City of Charlotte, NC; the City of Peoria, AZ, the Rutland Partnership (VT); the Greater Meredith Program (NH), and the Village of Sherwood (WI).

For a Free Initial Consultation on How Our Right Fit Program Can Help Your Community Contact:
Michael Fabrizio at (973) 727-8635, [email protected]
or
David Milder at (718) 805-9507, [email protected]

WILL DOWNTOWN RETAIL SOON REBOUND?

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Recent press reports have indicated increased retail sales and I am seeing in most media reports on the subject a kind of optimistic mood emerging about this sector’s recovery. I would suggest, however, that in looking at retail one should keep in mind the “show me the money” rule, i.e., to identify where consumers will be getting the money for their increased retail expenditures. The family house as a “piggy bank” from which consumers took about two trillion dollars in the years prior to the recession is basically gone. Median incomes have not really improved and most of the income increases have gone to the wealthiest households. Unemployment is slowly declining. Gas prices, child care, tuitions and medical expenses have all continued to increase faster than inflation. There does not appear to be much room for increased household retail expenditures.

The one area where there may be some wiggle room that will allow the 60% of our households that fall into the middle income category to increase spending is credit. As Floyd Norris recently noted in his NYT column, American households have been reducing their debt burdens: see http://nyti.ms/Idt8Kf

Some hedge fund mangers have suggested that in our current situation households are bringing down their debts and then using their new available credit to buy things until they again reach a level where they feel uncomfortable, when they will again buy less until they bring their debt levels down. I think they are correct and that we can expect retail sales to follow a bumpy up and down path for many years to come.

However, this pattern is far more likely to hold for downtowns where the median incomes of their trade areas’ households fall in the middle income range. In contrast, those, such as Morristown, NJ or Wellesey, MA, where the median household incomes are well above $90,000/yr are already finding that retailing is improving in a less choppy and more consistent pattern.

Office Development — We now have all the office space we need

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For several years now, I have been arguing that a New Normal has emerged for our downtowns and that the business operators, landlords, developers and district leaders who do not recognize that they must adapt to that fact are likely to face severe economic losses. My recently reported research on multichannel retailing (see my last blog posting below) combined with some some recent news items about movie attendance, housing and office development have strongly confirmed my argument.  This posting will focus on office development.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s office development was seen as the economic engine that would drive downtown revitalization in such major cities as Richmond VA, Charlotte NC, Cleveland OH, Philadelphia PA, Seattle WA. Los Angeles CA, etc. Office development primed revitalization efforts were also mounted in smaller cities such as  New Brunswick NJ,  (population 55,181) and White Plains NY  (population 56,853) and in suburban communities such as Morristown NJ (population 18,457), and Garden City NY (population 22,371). 

Many of these office driven revitalization efforts failed to achieve their goals and the downtowns had to add residential, retail and entertainment components to their revitalization strategies. Nevertheless, office development has remained a critical revitalization asset for many downtowns.

A recent article in  CoStar’s e-newsletter reported on the major findings of a symposium of office development experts convened by BOMA. A summary of their findings should put downtown leaders on notice:

“We already have all the office space we likely will need…. But to remain competitive, the existing stock of commercial real estate must be reconfigured to keep pace with an increasingly mobile, Internet-connected workforce; ongoing changes in technology, and to support the way companies are structuring their staffs to foster more collaboration and efficiency, while also addressing the values and attitudes of new generations of workers.”


 Increased telecommuting, flexible work schedules, the untethering of workers from desks to enhance collaboration and increase face-a-face client contacts have combined to increase employee density in major office buildings and reduce the demand for office space. For today’s office worker, according to one of these experts, the ideal situation may be:

(W)here you go into the office two or three days per week and work remotely the other days, which reduces our carbon footprint by 20% – 40% and has a huge impact on improved quality of life.”


 The potential negative impacts of the New Normal’s static demand for office space are:

    • Fewer new downtown office buildings will be built

 

  • Existing downtown office buildings that are not configured to meet the new work habits of office workers will have languishing leasing efforts. A lot of existing downtown office buildings may have to be renovated if they are to be competitive
  • Downtown retailers and eateries will have a significantly reduced office worker market because the telecommuters and flex-timers will spend much less time in the district.

 

 

Of course, downtowns also too often suffer from the fact that major office tenants provide incentives (cafeterias, subsidized meals and concierge services) and work pressures to keep their employees from leaving the building at lunchtime. Furthermore, the retailing many downtowns is often too weak to motivate substantial office worker patronage.

 But, there is a potential upside for downtowns that can provide a dynamic, experience-rich environment. As the CoStar article notes:
 

“The lesson for companies (and the investors and building owners who want to have them as tenants) is that younger workers prefer to work in a more dynamic, experience-rich environment, such as an urban- type setting offering different entertainment, cultural and transportation options.”


 Dynamic downtowns will consequently continue to have a distinct advantage in a highly competitive office market, while listless downtowns will probably be weaker competitors than ever.

The CoStar article can be found at:http://www.costar.com/News/Article/Will-We-Need-Any-More-Office-Space-/134483?ref=100&iid=261&cid=DC6077B43E67ACADB224FF6D0AF89AB6

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