For ye olde Choice editor and publisher, overseeing the new Choice office project, Liberty Square, has been a true learning experience.  So herewith, two lessons yours truly, who knows a fair amount about publishing but nothing at all about buying and building office space, has learned from Liberty Square to date.

First, it’s harder to buy office space than you might think.  When Choice began its search for new office space in the fall of 2005, one of the things we were initially worried about was money.  Did we have enough of it to buy an acceptable property?  The question we should have spent more time on was, “Are there any acceptable properties out there in the first place?”

It’s not that we didn’t know what we were looking for.  All we wanted was either an existing or a new property with approximately 7,500 square feet of office space in a downtown Middletown location.  It may have sounded simple, but it wasn’t.  By the summer of 2007, after two years of intensive searching, we had identified and looked at a grand total of six (6) potential properties.  Only two of these were bona fide possibilities.  Of the remaining four, three would have required leaving downtown and the fourth was a nonstarter (the first word out of our architect’s mouth was “ugh,” and things went downhill from there).  And while genuinely excited about the two bona fide possibilities, we ran into an unanticipated roadblock in both cases.  The sellers didn’t really want to sell; in fact both properties were taken off the market shortly after our visits.  Maybe it was something we said?

By the time the Liberty Square project came along in the summer of 2007, we were suffering a severe case of search fatigue.  This took a while to go away, even when presented with a new, energy-efficient, attractive office unit of 7,635 square feet, in a downtown location only two blocks from Riverview Center.  For several months, we kept waiting for things to go wrong.  Today, we increasingly realize how lucky we are.

The second lesson is that construction projects are not like software projects.  Based on our experience, there are at least three significant differences.  First, contractors are a bit more serious about their deadlines.  If they are planning to pour the floor slabs by Tuesday and need your electrical plan in order to do that, you will shortly find yourself inundated with voice mails and e-mails until you produce the missing information.  Software developers, not so much.  Second, contractors are always in a hurry.  Whether it’s the IT cabling plan, your interior finish selections, the interior space plan (a biggie), or the location of the main circuit boxes, they want an answer tomorrow at the latest.  Software developers, not so much.  Finally, “I don’t know yet” is never an acceptable answer with contractors.  Software developers are much more understanding, perhaps because they often don’t know the answer themselves.

And there you have it, two unexpected lessons from an unexpected source, Choice‘s new office space project.  Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?—IER