Tenant Intelligence

NASA just finished its latest effort, a 50,000 sf office building at the Moffett Field Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, California. It is being advertised as the “greenest” federal building. For years now, commercial office buildings have been the focus of sustainability groups and the next big push for making our world a more environmentally friendly place to live and work. It is true, there is a lot of energy to be saved and we can still improve upon the standards we all live by in our commercial buildings. NASA may have just set the bar for all of us.

April is here and we’ve all got taxes on the brain. Beginning this year, there are new IRS rules that affect how you treat repairs or improvements of your real estate or tangible property. Companies who acquire, maintain, improve or replace tangible property (which is just about everyone) need to be aware of the changes. According to a recent CFO Magazine article on the subject, one key issue is the characterization of upgrades to your property as “repairs” which can [...]

Green leasing is becoming an increasingly popular concept – one that evokes images of buildings that use no energy, where every space has an operable window and solar powered robotic vacuums quietly recycle water bottles and compost leftover lunches. Although these buildings don’t exist yet, the idea that a “green” lease will somehow make it so is a common misconception. So what is a green lease? How can you tell? And perhaps most importantly, how much will it cost?

We’ve released our U.S. Macro Forecast for 2012 and our outlook is tentatively optimistic. Click “Read Full Story” for a summary of our findings and the link to the full report.

Is a lease audit one of the top five tasks you do each year? Did you know that your lease is one of the top five expenses for your company? Every CFO or real estate decision maker should conduct an annual lease audit to stay current with your lease and compare it with the current market.

Accounting Standards – What’s The Latest? As a CEO or CFO, keeping an eye on the progress of the Global Accounting Standards topic will help you position your company and preserve its value. Specifically regarding your corporate real estate, an understanding of the discussion around the re-characterization of leases will benefit you in your leasing decisions. The changes being proposed primarily affect public companies but there will be a modified standard for smaller, non-public companies which is referred to as “Private-Company GAAP”.

You meet with your commercial real estate broker or talk on the phone and he gives you a market report for your area. Why? Isn’t it his job to know all those rent, vacancy and absorption numbers? Why should you care? The answers are important for your current and future business and may help you make business decisions aside from real estate.

Productivity – It’s our buzz word these days. Everyone is doing more with less. Green thinking is popular, but does it fit into business reality? Read on to learn how you can make environmental decisions with your physical space that actually improve your company’s performance … your brand, your people and your facilities.

A Tribute – 10 Years Later
- We Will Never Forget -
Click on “Read Full Story” and then the video for a moving tribute of music and photographs dedicated to the heroes and those lost on September 11, 2001.

With the volatility in the stock market last week, many of us are wondering what’s next. I’ve been writing about the increase in jobs in the economy and the venture capital boom as fundamentals pointing toward a slow but steady climb out of the recession. What should we do then with the downgrade of our U.S. credit rating and wild stock market activity last week? Should we hunker down and stop spending altogether or continue to move forward making business decisions as wisely as we can?