Commercial Properties Tour Stalls : Real estate: With building slump, an annual bus trip to projects is replaced by a conference in an unleased building.

It was the 11th annual bus tour of Orange County commercial real estate projects for the office park association. Only this year there weren’t any buses. Nor were there any projects, per se.

Instead of the traditional all-day road trip that chauffeured sightseers to the scene of the action, the 1992 “tour” brought the action to the sightseers--via the magic of video. About 250 developers, brokers, consultants and architects congregated at the Bramalea Bayview office in Newport Beach on Wednesday to view a screening of buildings and business parks.

Appropriately, the six-hour conference--which in addition to the video included breakfast, exhibit booths and lunch--took place on the unleased first floor of the otherwise plush building. Concrete floors and visible pipes lent the setting a garage party atmosphere.

The tour--or de tour, as organizers pegged it this year--had become a format for advertising finished buildings in need of tenants, rather than a trek through projects still under construction.

“As you know, there’s not much going on out there,” said Jeff Gwin, 1992 bus tour chairman for the Orange County branch of the National Assn. of Industrial and Office Parks, based in Arlington, Va. “We decided that loading people onto nine or 10 buses and hauling them around to buildings they’ve already seen would not be very useful.”

Gwin, vice president of development for the Irvine office of San Francisco-based Catellus Development Corp., called the video and exhibit booths “a showcase for developers.”

“We zeroed in on the special features of the projects,” he said. “When you’re on a bus, you can’t get out at every project and look at it up close.”

The two-part video featured buildings developed or managed by such weighty Orange County names as Tishman West Cos., Birtcher Development, Irvine Co. and Koll Co. Participants repeatedly touted the “competitive rental rates,” “prestigious location” and “outstanding amenities” of their buildings and business parks.

Most of the buildings offered ample unoccupied room to the tenant who might be in the market for, say, 50,000 or 100,000 square feet of space. All of the subjects in the video, except the Irvine Co. and Koll Co., posted rental rates and available-space figures.

“It gives us the chance for more exposure,” said Birtcher principal Bill Kearns, while manning an exhibit booth during intermission. “The bus tours included a lot of free-standing industrial buildings. This time, the focus was more on large, premier developments.”

While the event was presented for the benefit of brokers, whose task is to promote the buildings to tenants, David Giglio of CB Commercial Real Estate Group Inc. admitted that most of his colleagues are already very familiar with the sites.

“Brokers talk to these developers on a daily basis,” said Giglio, a sales assistant in CB’s Anaheim office. “It’s our job to know the market.”

Another broker, who requested anonymity, confided that the bus tours of the past were more informative. “This is like a long commercial,” he said. “I’m not learning anything today that I didn’t already know.”

But, he added, the NAIOP did the best it could with the “detour,” given the lack of material this year: “There’s just zilch happening.”