Single-Tenant Buildings: A Thing of the Past?

GREENWICH, CT—Will the economic slowdown and tight corporate budget environment lead to fewer companies using entire buildings acting as their sole tenant? While there isn’t any indication such a trend will have a widespread impact on the traditional net lease property market, it may result in an increase in repositioning opportunities with what were once single-tenant buildings but are heading for partial or full vacancy.

Those are the kinds of opportunities Greenwich, CT-based Hanover Real Estate Partners is interested in, though managing partner Reed Miller concedes that it is hard to estimate just how much actually investing the company might do along these lines in 2010. “It could be hundreds of millions of equity, or we could keep our powder dry,” says Miller. The company has a base of private high net worth and family office and trust investors as equity partners.

Still, he and fellow managing partner Kenneth Boyle think the current environment–in particular a trend for companies to downsize and reduce the space they occupy, as well as the less favorable economics for companies to develop their own buildings–could result in these kinds of opportunities. In particular, says Boyle, he sees a “resurgence of tenants who in the past might have looked at building their own corporate headquarters who are now either looking to buy buildings that they can reposition into their corporate headquarters or are looking to share space in existing buildings and accept more of a multi-tenanted environment.”