By Tony Wilbert
ATLANTA (May 3, 2011) - After writing about thousands of companies signing more than 10,000 office leases, I realized this spring it finally was time for me to sign a lease of my own.
Earlier this spring Wilbert News Strategies leased its first office space for the firm's headquarters. Our 1,832-square-foot lease at Peachtree 25th on the southern edge of Buckhead isn't large compared with recent six-figure deals signed in Atlanta, but for WNS it's a big step.
Wilbert News Strategies is a public relations, communications and social media firm. While we're proud to be considered a top real estate communications firm, we have clients in a a wide spectrum of industries including beverages, legal, hospitality, construction and wealth management.
On Saturday, Caroline and I celebrated our firm's lease with our tenant rep and his wife at Bone's. Today, we erected our logo on the wall to make it official.
When we started Wilbert News Strategies, our largest client, Carter, let us set up shop at its headquarters at 171 17th St. in Atlantic Station. It was a great set up and enabled the firm to grow quickly. Grow we did - to the point where we needed a space of our own. (Of course, WNS owes a big thank you to all Carter associates, especially President Scott Taylor, for helping make our launch possible two years ago. Carter remains our largest client, and we are honored to work for the company.)
When it came time to search for space, no doubt existed about whether to use a commercial Realtor. We asked Dale Lewis, a friend and Carter broker, to be our broker and assist us in our search. We toured several cool spaces and reconnected with old friends and sources as they toured us through their buildings.
We picked an office building in Midtown as our favorite, but we could not come to terms with the landlord. While we had a general idea of how much office space we desired, we had a much firmer idea of how much we could spend each month.
This led us to take a look at Peachtree 25th, a 10-story office tower in the Brookwood micro-market that we had not considered during Round 1. We checked out a couple spaces in the complex and then toured the space on the 10th floor that would become our new corporate home.
The owner of Peachtree 25th, Atlanta Property Group, did a great job working with us on getting a lease done. We signed a 5.5-year lease and moved into the top-floor space in March.
Since we moved in, we've only had one tenant rep cold call us in person (despite building policy allowing no solitication). We told him we are more than happy with Dale and Carter - and about not having to think about our office search for several years.
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