Sycamore Springs Office Park

Northeast side of Indianapolis

Case Study

CHALLENGE

Sycamore Springs Office Park was constructed in 2004, with adjacent proximity to an abundance of retail and residential developments. When our team took over the leasing of the complex in 2007, this 4-building, garden style office park was at a mere 60% occupancy. With thriving demographics, the park should have been a home run. Since the park’s inception, Ownership wanted the park to be fully leased as quickly as possible in order to sell it and generate a sizeable profit. To achieve this task while the park occupancy was floating just over the line of being half full, we had to act quickly and aggressively to turn this property around.

ACTION

Through conducting thorough market research, we determined that the main cause of the low occupancy was the poor tenant mix, as well as extremely high and unwarranted CAM rates. In 2007, the tenancy consisted of a random mixture of insurance, real estate, financial and law professionals, with the majority occupying the medical field in a multitude of areas. With high turnover in tenants who were not medical users, it became apparent that this park was destined to be a medical complex. Filling the vacant space was obvious, but retaining our current tenants proposed a major challenge because the relationship had been largely strained due to poor management.

  • Our first course of action was to communicate our re-branding efforts to the brokerage community through open houses, tours, phone calls and email marketing in order to attract more medical tenants
  • Hire a new property management team to quickly and effectively reduce the common area maintenance charges
  • A priority was placed on reaching out to current tenants to communicate our efforts and to put an emphasis on their importance to the park

RESULTS

After the marketing and re-branding program was well established, our team was able to re-introduce the park to the brokerage community and accomplish the following:

  • Took the building from 60% to 90% occupancy in under three years with 90% retention
  • The top two largest tenants were new tenants to the park, resulting in 85% medical users