Sitehawk Retail Real Estate News

Sites Set on Success in Retail Real Estate

Download full article as it appeared in Heartland Real Estate Business

This article appeared in the October 2008 edition of Heartland Real Estate Business. Click the link above to download the article in original format.

Sitehawk Retail Real Estate is diversifying and strengthenging its presence in Indiana a year after its rebranding.

Indianapolis-based Sitehawk Retail Real Estate, founded over 25 years ago as The Linder Company, hit the ground running in 2007 after successfully renaming and rebranding the organization. The full-service brokerage company founded, primarily as a tenant representation firm, has grown to include landlord representation services, as well as a rapidly growing property management division. Heartland Real Estate Business recently spoke with Sitehawk’s four principals — Mark Perlstein, Steve Delaney, Scott Gray, Larry Davis and Sitehawk’s new director of property management, David Ciechanowicz, about the state of the Indianapolis retail sector, the company 1 year after it’s name change and its plans for growth in this challenging economic environment.

The company was formed by Gary Linder in 1982, and acquired by the four current principals (Perlstein, Delaney, Gray and Davis) a little more than 3 years ago. Linder had established a strong name in the industry, and the principals knew it was important to change the company’s identity and move forward as the company’s new owners.

“It was always our desire to rebrand the company,” Gray explains. “We spent a lot of time, money and effort, retaining an in-town advertising agency, to navigate the name change.”
At the time of the name change, which occurred last spring, the company rebranded its signage at more than 100 shopping centers that it leased or managed.

“With the rebranding of the company name and introduction of our new logo, we changed over 100 signs around the state, which lead to a lot of buzz throughout the industry,” Gray says. “The reoccurring comment was that the Sitehawk logo is everywhere. It’s not so much that we have more properties; it’s that people have noticed the new look with the new logo.”

The company is happy with the success its found since the name change, as its built upon the foundations laid during the past 2 decades of tenant and landlord representation. The landlord representation business began growing soon after the company was founded, starting with the addition of Perlstein in 1985. It is now a core aspect of Sitehawk’s business activity.

“Currently, the industry is dictating where we are spending much of our time, because of the state of the economy” Gray says. “The tenant representation business is not as robust as it has been in previous years, and we are seeing a tremendous increase in third-party leasing business. Our listing business is really strong right now; we are currently marketing approximately 7 million square feet of space throughout the state. Again, I think that it is because the tenant side of the business is a little down.”

Sitehawk has no plans to de-emphasize its tenant representation focus, but in commercial real estate, you have to go where the business is. Many national retailers have slowed expansion or halted growth efforts altogether while they sort out their operations and get a handle on the state of the economy and its effects on the retail real estate market. There are a number of things brokerage companies can do to continue to grow and profit in these times, and it all starts in-house.

“Challenging times mean that we have to do a combination of things, ranging from using our in-house resources, which include our ability to work together as a team, to electronic marketing through our email and web presence and working the International Council of Shopping Center events,” Davis notes. “We feel we have unparalleled market knowledge, which allows us to respond quickly and tackle challenges in creative ways. We are out there working hard for our clients, willing to pound the pavement and to turn over leads that may have been left untouched.”

Sitehawk is focusing on maximizing its team’s strengths and minimizing individual weaknesses to close deals in this difficult market. The balance has shifted in the retail market, and tenants are enjoying greater negotiating power in current lease transactions.

“In my 25 years, this is probably the most significant slowdown I have seen,” Perlstein says. “We had such good times for a while, but we’ve got to get back to our grassroots efforts, making cold calls and being more aggressive than we were in the past.”

“There has been a major shift in our business,” Gray concedes. “We are experiencing tenants in the driver’s seat, driving some difficult deals. Landlords have vacancy as new projects are trying to get off the ground, and they don’t have as many choices as before if they want good credit quality tenants.

“Our philosophy and our message to our landlords is that , you cannot sit on deals. You have to be aggressive and make deals. You may get a dollar or two per square foot less than you want, but if you sit on a property for 6 to 12 months, you will have eaten that dollar or two. Our marching orders to our brokers are, ‘When you have a deal, do everything in your power to get it done as quickly as you can.’”

According to Gray, stable, intelligent retailers are using the current market to their advantage by making excellent business deals in a lot of very good locations positioning them to be sitting pretty when the smoke clears in the coming years, stable stores in very strong locations.

Though the development market is also slowing down in the Indianapolis area, there are some strong projects opening up, and a number of projects that are in the planning stages hoping to break ground in 24 to 36 months once the economy is on the uptick. So, it is a good time for Sitehawk to emphasize the growth of its property management division, which has been around for a number of years. The principals have made a conscious decision to put their resources and funds into building the property management division as a major part of the company. The first step in establishing the operations was hiring David Ciechanowicz, who brings 29 years of local real estate expertise to the company.

“We have been in property management for years, but we were never significantly invested in the business because we didn’t know which direction we wanted to take,” Gray explains. “After we bought the company and completed the rebranding initiative, we decided to make our big push into property management. When we decided to take this direction and focus on growing this division, the first thing we had to do was hire a person to manage that aspect of the company”

“With David’s experience, it allows us to open doors better than we have in the past, giving us a nice advantage that we think is important in today’s environment,” Perlstein notes.

According to Davis, another reason Sitehawk felt that it was a good time to grow this aspect of the company is directly attributable to its clients’ successes. “We have a couple of clients in particular that have been working on ground-up developments and have projects coming to fruition, giving us demand for these services and a new client pool that is essentially built in,” he explains.

Ciechanowicz’s first order of business has been to establish the infrastructure necessary for a full-service retail property management company. Sitehawk had much of the accounting software and pieces in place; it was just a matter of customizing much of the parts to suit property management.

“We will serve all types of retail,” Ciechanowicz says. “We have the infrastructure and tools we need to serve a variety of clients from the mom and pop stores to the biggest centers and institutional operators.”

Sitehawk will target retail owners that directly manage their properties and are looking to outsource the task, as well as third-party operators.
As Ciechanowicz notes, “You only have one chance to make a first impression for a tenant, so quality of services has to be emphasized.”

Attacking the expansion of its property management division with the same dedication used in the rebranding and growth efforts initiated over the past year, Sitehawk is diversifying and setting the stage to be a major player in Indiana retail for years to come.

Media Contact:
Melissa Hancock - 317.402.9898

Sitehawk is one of the Midwest’s leading retail real estate firms, founded in 1982 as The Linder Company and renamed Sitehawk in 2007, the firm has earned a national reputation for excellence in national tenant representation, landlord representation, retail property management and development services.

As an affiliate of Chainlinks Retail Advisors, America’s preeminent retail real estate brokerage network, Sitehawk provides its clients with a combination of national capabilities and in-depth local market knowledge. From its Indianapolis headquarters, Sitehawk leasing professionals serve an impressive array of national retailers including Borders, LA Fitness, Old Navy, Costco, J.C. Penney, Chase Bank, Dunkin Donuts and many others. For more information please visit www.sitehawkretail.com or call 317-844-5313.