Taking the guesswork out of telecom connectivity (Part 1) by Robert Bianco

Robert Bianco, Windstream

Commercial leasing brokers and real estate agents in New York City have to wear many hats. One moment, you are being asked to be an expert in Italian marble and plumbing fixtures. The next, you are being asked whether this wall or that wall can be knocked down to open up a space for a meeting room, followed by questions about the nearest Soul Cycle club because more than a five-minute walk is a dealbreaker for a company’s employees. You are everything from a structural engineer to a psychiatrist as your clients go through the ups and downs of finding a space that meets their needs. And over the past few years, your job has become even more complicated because clients also expect you to be an expert in telecommunications and network infrastructure.

No doubt many of you have been through this exact scenario: A company is looking for a larger space and you have gotten over the first half dozen hurdles. Their real estate agent has checked off all the boxes on her/his checklist for the search. The office manager likes the layout and the square footage. The CEO likes the view from his or her office. The last meeting in the process is a chat with the company’s CIO or IT manager, and your fingers are crossed that it’s just a formality…but it turns out to be anything but. You get asked a million questions about things like fiber density, network diversity, number of service providers, and the deal ends up stalling or falling through because it turns out the property doesn’t have the specifications the IT department is looking for in terms of telecommunication infrastructure.

CIOs and IT managers have more influence than ever before on commercial real estate deals because network infrastructure plays such a big role in the decision about office space. After all, so many businesses today rely on high-speed, 24x7 access, having their data secured and having a back up plan in place if something goes down. Unfortunately, a property’s telecom infrastructure is often hidden behind walls and under the street outside the building. It’s not apparent to the naked eye, and even if it were it would be inscrutable to a lay person. Adding to the difficulty, some telecom companies don’t always provide detailed information about how well-connected the building is.

The result is that brokers and agents sometimes have little to work with when they are bombarded by a million technical questions about technical specifications. And potential tenants have too often been forced to make office leasing decisions without knowing for certain that the space would support their technical needs for Internet, data and voice services.

To address this issue, an organization called WiredScore developed an international standard for measuring Internet connectivity in buildings; providing owners, asset managers and leasing brokers with a critical tool to market their properties and to answer the questions they get from prospective tenants. Since launching its certification service here in New York three years ago, WiredScore has expanded across the country and internationally. It has now certified more than 700 properties totalling a quarter of a billion s/f of office space in over 50 cities worldwide. The most interesting measure of its momentum is that there are now more WiredScore-certified commercial buildings in New York than LEED-certified buildings.

In Part 2 of this article, I will go into detail about what WiredScore analyses when it certifies a building as well as how that gives real estate brokers a powerful tool for marketing their buildings.

Part 2 can be found in the Dec. 6^th New York Real Estate Journal.

Robert Bianco is a regional director for Windstream, New York, N.Y.