Newest Offices Have Concierges Going for Them
A harried corporate lawyer who hates to shop was delighted recently to discover that his landlord at the Koll Center office building in Irvine had provided an easy way for him to obtain a birthday present for his girlfriend.
He summoned the building concierge, who an hour later returned with a pearl necklace at “just the right price” in exchange for a $25 errand fee.
And like clockwork every Monday morning the president of Irvine-based National Education Corp. receives a bouquet of long-stem, mauve-colored gladioli or ginger for his office--evidence that the same concierge service is on its toes.
The Koll Center in Irvine is at the leading edge of a nationwide move by office building operators to provide tenants with a full-service concierge similar to what is more commonly found in first-class hotels. But other prestige office buildings in Orange County--at Irvine’s Douglas Plaza, Costa Mesa’s South Coast Metro Center and Santa Ana’s Hutton Centre, especially--are hastening to do the same.
In the fierce competition for tenants to fill the glut of posh new high-rises around the country, landlords are drafting into combat the concierge--a cross between a personal valet, official greeter and genie.
It is unknown exactly how many office buildings have concierges, although the number is thought to be small. Some have cropped up recently in such major office markets as New York, Atlanta, Washington, Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles. But an increasing number of developers say they are planning to provide such one-stop, at-your-service attendants in future buildings as a way of adding yet another touch of class to the most elite high-rise edifices.
Roger Torriero, president of Griffin Realty Corp., a Newport Beach-based developer of commercial real estate, predicts that concierge services will catch on as fast as office center car detailers did in Southern California just a few years ago. “I think as time goes by tenants will expect a concierge service,” he said.
Usually located in the lobby of an office building, the concierge is a central clearinghouse for mundane services such as dry cleaning, shoe repairs and car washes that tenants can procure at prices no higher than they would find by scouting the neighborhood.
In addition, the concierge will cater to a much broader menu of individual demands from tenants, charging about $25 an hour to perform such customized services as shopping.
A concierge at the Westwood Gateway in Los Angeles satisfied a request from California Sen. Pete Wilson, a tenant in the building, by finding and delivering a Russian Scrabble game and dictionary to the Bel-Air home that a Soviet official was visiting. And a Dallas concierge pleased an elderly businessman by obtaining a baby elephant from a circus and delivering it anonymously to his grandson’s home to celebrate the boy’s birthday.
Occasional Defeat
However, even the most eager concierge sometimes must concede defeat. A concierge at a Houston high-rise said he was frustrated in trying to find tenants in the building who would adopt a basket of mongrel puppies. The fashionable tenants, who drove “Mercedes and Lamborghinis,” he said, preferred pedigreed dogs to “fence jumpers.”
The concierge is considered a particularly useful amenity for upscale suburban office towers that are distant from shopping districts.
At the Koll Center, the nearest shops are more than two miles away. Karen Piper, the asset manager at the center, said that in lunch-hour traffic, a trip to a dry cleaner can turn into “a 45-minute venture.”
Since a concierge suite opened May 19 at Koll Center, however, tenants on their way to work can drop off their laundry and dry cleaning with the concierge and pick it up the next day. The cleaning is done by outside firms, which have an agreement to collect and deliver the clothing at the Koll Center.
Voila, the firm that operates the Koll Center concierge, touts itself as a “broker” of services, contracting on a regular basis with about 50 vendors, ranging from launderers and film processors to florists and limousine services. In addition, company officials say they have a directory of about 150 firms they can call upon for more customized orders, such as arranging a champagne breakfast in bed on Valentine’s Day.
Also offering Koll tenants a travel and entertainment ticketing service, Voila boasts that it can obtain the best seats at the hottest concerts and sports events. Building tenants also can stop by the concierge office to buy a magazine or sundries, check out a movie or exercise videotape or, faced with a social emergency, purchase a gift-wrapped basket of wine.
Kim Norton, president of Voila, said that she can sell services to tenants at prices no higher than they would pay elsewhere--and still make a profit for her company--because she is able to obtain wholesale discounts from vendors.
Offered Rent-Free Space
In recruiting concierge firms to their buildings, most developers are giving them an extended period of free rent until they can market their service to the other tenants and the new buildings fill up, providing the concierge firms with a larger and more viable customer base. Koll has such an arrangement with Voila.
Norton said that a concierge operates on a thin profit margin and is highly dependent on both the breadth of services it brokers and its volume of business. She said she hopes to achieve annual revenue of at least $100,000 within two years at Koll Center in Irvine, which currently houses about 6,000 workers in 1.5 million square feet.
Patrick Murphy, Koll’s vice president of marketing, acclaimed the concierge “a great sales tool.” He said it is part of “an amentity package” that, along with restaurants, a health club and landscaped plazas, has helped Koll to outstrip its competition in leasing.
“I think basically we are looking at a market where we have to offer a lot of amenities and create a life style within the building itself,” said Joan Kent, marketing coordinator for Torrance-based Transpacific Development Co., which has recruited another concierge firm, American Concierge Inc., to South Coast Metro Center in Costa Mesa.
American Concierge President Nancy Valeri said that in addition to services like laundry and shoe repair, the South Coast Metro Center concierge office will have a hair stylist, manicurist, tanning bed and a tuxedo and gown rental.
Grocery Shopping
Salima Din, formerly a hotel concierge, plans to set up shop next month at the First Interstate Building in San Diego. Among other conveniences, the building’s pampered tenants no longer will have to spend time grocery shopping. Each morning they will be able to drop off their shopping lists at a lobby desk. By quitting time, the groceries will be purchased and delivered to their offices.
Torriero, of Griffen Realty Corp., said he believes the concierge is a remedy for the cold, impersonal feeling of so many Southern California building lobbies. “I think when people enter a building it is important they not just be confronted with electronic wizardry like computerized directories,” he said.
Some owners of office buildings have decided not to lease office space to an independent concierge firm, but instead to train concierge employees to their own specifications and pay their salaries as part of the cost of building management.
Susan McKinniss, vice president of marketing for Douglas Development Co., said Douglas employees will operate a concierge service for a 17-story, marble-and-steel office building that it is opening next December in Douglas Plaza, across the street from John Wayne Airport.
Housed in a modernistic annex, the Douglas Plaza concierge will provide a limousine and courier service at no charge to tenants.
Service Provides an Edge
“Service really today is one of the most important keys to a successful project,” McKinniss said. “We all have great buildings and are competitive rate-wise.”
Cadillac Fairview Corp. Ltd., a large Toronto-based developer and owner of office buildings, intends to place “concierge services in every major office building within our portfolio in the United States,” said company spokesman Diana Smith.
Since 1982, she said, Cadillac Fairview has put concierge workers it trains and pays in five new buildings in New York, Washington, Dallas and Fort Worth. Next fall, she added, a concierge will debut in a 32-story office building that the company will be opening at 6500 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles.
And within the next two years, Cadillac Fairview said it plans to open four more high-rise office buildings--all with concierges. An advantage of having a nationwide concierge network, Smith said, is that Cadillac Fairview office tenants planning a business trip to another part of the country can call ahead to an out-of-town concierge for travel tips and assistance.
Yet another builder, Homart Development Co., intends to place a concierge in its new 24-story Wilshire Landmark high-rise in Los Angeles.
Homart senior development director Chris Sterling said the concierge will cater to professional tenants who have a lot of visitors. For instance, the concierge will be able to arrange for foreign-language interpreters or quickly replace or launder a shirt spotted by spilled coffee, he said .
In Orange County, at least one company has contracted for a concierge service on its own premises as an employee benefit. Karl Lorimar Home Video maintains a pickup and delivery spot in its Irvine plant for dry cleaning, shoe repair and film developing.
More Leisure Time
Court Shannon, Karl Lorimar executive vice president, said as a result of the concierge service, employees “not only are saving time and becoming more productive, but they are able to enjoy their leisure time as well.”
The emergence of a new breed of office building concierge, however, has raised skepticism among some hotel concierges, who have been an increasingly familiar sight in hotel lobbies in the United States since the mid-1970s.
Jack K. Nargil, president of the U.S. branch of Les Cles d’Or, an international society of concierges, said office building concierges serve the same function as a hotel concierge, “but they don’t have the same qualifications and we don’t allow them into our organization.”
A handicap of many office building concierges, Nargil said, is that they haven’t worked in the field long enough to form extensive contacts. “The value of a concierge is his contacts in the industry, not just in the city where he is but around the world,” he said. Nargil, who works at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown said that he, for instance, can quickly procure theater tickets in Paris or Rome by “just picking up the telephone.”
“You are able to do these things, which are miracles, because you have a contact,” he said.
And not all office building developers are convinced of the need for concierges. Chase McLaughlin, a spokesman for C. J. Segerstrom & Sons, said there is no concierge planned for that company’s prestige Town Center office towers in Costa Mesa, because the area already has laundry, travel and other services close by.
The Pan American Building in New York, whose motto is “the world’s most civilized work environment,” three years ago became one of the country’s first high-rises to provide a concierge service for its tenants. But Jim Nass, the building’s assistant director of operations, said tenants use the service only as a last resort. He speculates that is partly because New York has such a huge concentration of retail services.
Besides, Nass observed, the much-vaunted self-sufficiency of New Yorkers works against the concierge concept: “Every self-respecting New Yorker has his own wealth of resources and cherishes them. . . .”
