This past Friday, Lee Partners was in hot pursuit of a new logistics center for PSS World Medical, a supplier of end-user products to medical professionals.
They have dozens of distribution centers across the country. In Wareham, MA, they have a location that is not quite large enough for their growing business. Lee Partners worked with their corporate real estate partner, PointLine, Inc., vis-a-vis Walt Batansky, their CEO. The tour took us to a number of locations in southeastern Massachusetts. On the tour was their local director of operations and a couple of gents from the Florida headquarters who specialize in efficiency and optimization. Very keen eyes for how space can and needs to be used by their firm.
It was refreshing to be working with clients who have a specific physical need for the space, more than general office space, commercial real estate clients. Sometimes space users come at their square footage needs from a simple formula of feet-per-employee. Sometimes there is a general sense of wanting something different and generally more. And often it is an arbitrary number in the budget that determines the space. The fellows from PSS were talking about numbers of aisles of racking, the depths of each run of aisle, the traffic on the floor between racking, cold storage, and loading docks. I would like to find more commercial office space users who investigate how employees use space and how space is not directly related to use. This leads into more of my ongoing discussion of the future of office space – but that is for another entry.
In the end, the need for multiple loading docks to handle the traffic of their rapid-run delivery van fleet is a dominator in the decision-making process for PSS. It is a bottleneck that can’t be fudged. This property in Sharon seems to fit the bill, but we’ll see how the owner responds to our RFP. Base rent terms are still important, and all the other details even how far employees have to walk to get to the front door factor into the decision. It’s never straight out of the play book in real estate. You always need to be hands on and in person to see your options. I’m glad I could help Walt at PointLine and Chris and his crew from PSS. I’ll keep you posted!
Grey