Not Everything is Peaches in Georgia: Challenges and Success of BRES Atlanta

Although we have been purposefully quiet for the past nine months, the 1.4 million SF Block Atlanta portfolio came under the management of BRES Atlanta in the summer of 2011 and we took off. With budget season coming on for the 19 building portfolio, a load of planning and learning the portfolio was a warp speed experience to be able to meet the budget deadlines and offer up accurate and timely work product. Well, as you can see, we did survive and we did pull it off—but that is why you have not heard a lot out of us here in the Peach State.

The BRES Atlanta management team consists of 

• Bert S. Calvert, Managing Director, Atlanta Operations
• Renee Harrison, Property Administrator

Our engineering team consists of

• Michael Granberry, Building Services Engineer 
• John “JD” Duncan, Maintenance Engineer

Our combined years of experience will tell you more about our ages than we care to disclose but suffice it to say, we all thoroughly enjoy what we do since we have been doing it for so many years.  

But it hasn't been all peaches in Georgia. I will share with you one unique challenge we experienced. 

We located the BRES Atlanta office in Mansell 400 Business Center in Roswell, Georgia.  Roswell is an affluent suburb roughly 20 miles north of Midtown Atlanta. It made a lot of sense to locate the BRES Atlanta office in the park, so we located in a 9,790 sf vacant office in one of the 2-story buildings. 

This happened to be more space than we needed. One of our challenges was to get the spare space leased---hopefully to an executive suites operation to minimize the expense of having to refit the space for a standard office use. After three failed attempts at trying to lease the space with the appropriate incentives, it became clear that we would be hard pressed to find an operator who would take the risk of a suites start-up in this economy. We did find an operator who offered to operate the suites on a “fee” basis. So, we negotiated a management agreement with a local suites chain that has been in business for 33 years and operates executive suites in several other Atlanta office sub-markets. 

While that puts BRES Atlanta in the executive suites business, with the associated risk that goes with it, we believe we can make this a real success at a cost less that we could refit for a standard office operation and the associated concessions that would be required to fill a 9,790 sf space in today’s market.

So, yes, we have been extremely quiet here in Atlanta—but it is not for lack of anything to do.  Once we come up for air, we hope to get to meet those of you we have not had a chance to work with and as always, we look forward to being a big part of the success of Block Real Estate Services.

Contributing Author:

Bert S. Calvert
Managing Director
Block Real Estate Services