Property managers' duties shift in tight times
By Diane Mastrull
Inquirer Staff Writer
In better times - that is to say, when companies were clamoring for office space rather than looking to jettison it - property management didn't have to amount to much.
Now, those "days of putting the lipstick on the pig are long gone," said Richard McClure, managing director of Kennedy Wilson Properties Ltd., which takes care of the 32-story Aramark Tower on Market Street in Center City. "It's all about [tenant] retention, retention, retention."
And about finding ways to operate the buildings more economically.
With demand for office space on the decline, "it's been very hard to move rental rates," said Jerry Sweeney, president and chief executive officer of Brandywine Realty Trust. "If you can't move rental rates, it becomes even more important to control your operation expense, so you can maintain your operating margins."
The bottom line is that when it comes to the financial bottom line of this region's stressed office towers and campuses, property managers and building engineers are finding themselves under unprecedented pressure to deliver.
Here's how three of them get the job done.
Tweaking all the time
As chief operating building engineer for Two Logan Square, Jack Harrigan is, you might say, obsessive. As any BlackBerry addict would know, technology has helped make him that way.
Consider what he says about his weekends:
"When you're at home over the weekend and it's snowing, you're on the computer looking at the [Two Logan security] cameras to see if the sidewalks are clear."
Even if weather isn't an issue, he's tapping into the building's automated monitoring system at least once each weekend, "to see what the computers are telling me" about heating and cooling units and a host of other functions that can be changed, if necessary, with a few keystrokes.
But when he's actually in the belly of the 35-story office building on 18th Street just off Logan Square, Harrigan's not only looking, but listening. A squeak, he explained, could mean a slipping fan belt that "could mean wasted energy."
And he's checking the amount of static in the air-intake ducts because that determines the speed at which the fans turn. That, in turn, affects energy use.
He's also adjusting the amount of outside air drawn into the building, depending, with the help of carbon dioxide monitoring, on how many people are on any given floor. More fresh air than is needed means more air being heated or cooled unnecessarily.
Especially at a time when so many office buildings are eager for more tenants, the key to any of these changes, Harrigan said, is making them without drawing complaints from the tenants.
"I tell my guys, 'If you don't see any of our tenants in the course of a day, you did good.' "
High-sheen standards
Michael Mortka is all about tenant interaction - from tracking down the one who sideswiped the vehicle of another, to scolding those that don't follow the aesthetics-driven policy for window blinds: Either they are all the way up or all the way down.
As a property manager with Grubb & Ellis Co., a real estate services company, Mortka has been assigned for 17 years to the Tower Bridge office complex in Conshohocken and West Conshohocken. He is responsible for three of the six buildings developer Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corp. still owns there.
And Wednesday morning, the self-described nitpicker was not happy as he approached the entrance to one of his charges, One Tower Bridge.
"See this? This ain't a great picture right here," Mortka said, pointing to coffee stains on the sidewalk and shaking his head in disgust.
"The tenants come in, and that's what they see. We want them to come in and think it's Disney World."
That's why Mortka insists that even the nickel-silver elevator thresholds are polished to a shine, along with any other reflective surface.
It is a standard demanded by developer Donald Pulver, who set the no-in-between policy on the window blinds to avoid a mish-mash appearance from the road.
He is the same guy who insists that Mortka wear a suit and tie every day, even though his duties might require him to be on the roof of a building or in the garage.
But most times, Mortka said, he is walking a tightrope, "always trying to find the proper balance between doing the right thing and spending too much money."
Consequently, he was no pushover Wednesday afternoon when he sat across from Rob Gutekunst, manager of office services and facilities for Jacobs Engineering, which occupies all of Three Tower Bridge and some of Six Tower Bridge.
Jacobs is a safety-conscious company, and Gutekunst was proposing $4,350 in striping and signs for the parking area "to raise awareness" that pedestrians are frequently there. Gutekunst's goal is to get the work done by June, National Safety Month.
"It's a small price to pay if we think it's going to keep people safer," Gutekunst said.
Maybe so, Mortka acknowledged. But the reality, he said, is "my 2010 budget is not going to cover all of this."
They parted with a handshake and agreed to keep talking.
In snow, ideas bloom
The bad news for tenants of the Aramark Tower is that rent decreases are not in the offing. The good news is that last month's blizzard might help contain future operating-expense increases that likely would have been passed on to them.
For as the record snows fell, John Healy, the building's operations manager, and McClure, the property's general manager, stayed in town to baby-sit the building.
But they also used that time to come up with a new lighting plan for the lobby that is expected to cut energy costs as much as $7,000 a year by phasing out throughout the night the number of bulbs left on.
Their search continues for other ways to reduce expenses. Under consideration: ground-source heat pumps that use wastewater from the city mains as a transfer medium for heating and cooling.
For now, Healy and McClure are paying a lot of attention to a 42-inch flat-screen monitor that was installed in Healy's office in August. Called "the dashboard," it displays graphs and columns of data in yellow, green, blue, red, and white, and a weather icon that changes as conditions outside do.
Healy and McClure use it to monitor Aramark Tower's major mechanical systems and the conditions in which tenants are working.
"It has been one of the biggest drivers of some of the changes we've made," Healy said.
A less-wastefully run Aramark Tower is also a boon for some outside the building. The property is owned by the Girard Estate, which supports the students and operation of Girard College, McClure said.
Contact staff writer Diane Mastrull at 215-854-2466 or dmastrull@phillynews.com.
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