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TENANT COORDINATORS VITAL LINK BETWEEN RETAILER, LANDLORD

By Dees Stribling

The tenant coordinator’s goal is straightforward enough. The job can be anything but.

“About nine weeks before the grand opening of a new outdoor center, I got an urgent call from one of the tenants — a very good national retailer with about 5,000 square feet,” said Mark DiCapri, senior director of tenant coordination for new development at General Growth Properties. “Even though they’d approved the design previously, they’d determined that the line of structural columns in the center of their space wasn’t going to work with their merchandising.”

These are the moments that try the mettle of a tenant coordinator. Working as the representative of a landlord, the coordinator must see to it that a new tenant builds out according to the perimeters in the lease and, perhaps more important, opens as quickly as possible. In existing space this is important so that the landlord can start earning rent, but at a new center it is even more crucial — having all retailers ready on opening day is vital to the image of the center.

That phone call set DiCapri and his staff to working practically around the clock with the architect and contractor to remake the project. “We removed those columns and reconfigured the structural elements, all within nine weeks, and were able to open in time,” he said. “We never forgot the goal, which was to get them up and running for the grand opening.”

The beginnings of tenant coordination as a profession are lost to business history now, but it is likely that they go back to the post-World War II “malling” of America. Though getting a retailer into a space always involved more than handing over a key, until perhaps the 1980s the role of tenant coordinator was essentially to bird-dog mall tenants and make sure they opened on time and obeyed the dictates of leases that tended to be less complicated than today’s.

But these days the coordinator’s involvement runs considerably deeper. “As soon as the lease is signed, that’s when the deal is passed along to the tenant coordinator,” said Scott Petrie, vice president of retail management at Philadelphia-based PREIT. “He has to be a partner with the retailer and its contractor all the way through the design and construction, watching to see that hundreds of details go smoothly.”

Petrie says sticking points can come up at any time in the process. The landlord and tenant could disagree on signage, for instance, or there could be a snafu in the permitting. The problem could even be something as simple yet confounding as the tenant’s forgetting to provide the most recent building plans to the contractor, which then works from obsolete plans. The tenant coordinator’s job is to “unstuck” those sticking points — try to devise a signage compromise, figure out how permitting can proceed, see to it that the revised plans get to the project manager.

“The possibilities for miscommunication and delay are endless,” said Petrie. “The tenant coordinator has to make sure that everyone — the tenant, the landlord, the architect and the contractor — are all on the same page.”

Sometimes they must be quite literally on the same page. “We physically hand the contractor the set of approved drawings to save time and get the tenant open sooner,” DiCapri said. “One of the most important parts of tenant coordination is to make sure that the contractor understands what the lease agreement contains, what has been agreed to, and make sure that he has the latest set of approved drawings from the landlord.”

In fact, says DiCapri, the process begins before the final set of drawings is passed to the contractor. “The contractor often doesn’t know the history of what was discussed between the landlord and the tenant, either in terms of appearance or other features. What we do as tenant coordinators is start working with the on-site people early. Usually, this takes the form of preconstruction conferences with the contractor to relay what’s been worked out.”

In the old days, when tenant coordinators shepherded local retailers or even mom-and-pops into the brave new world of the mall, many tenants probably needed a point person to guide them. But is that really necessary anymore, in this age of experienced, national tenants, who may open dozens of new stores a year?

Absolutely, sources say. “Each retail site is different, and no matter how much experience a retailer has in opening stores, each new store is going to be different,” said William D. Rowe, vice president of tenant relations at Forest City Enterprises. “As a landlord, we try to be sympathetic to a national prototype, but we also have certain considerations, especially for the way a store exterior looks, and so the tenant and landlord have to find common ground. A tenant can’t be expected to know all those considerations for every site, and part of a tenant coordinator’s job is to educate tenants in the particulars.”

Of course, there are still some relatively inexperienced retailers with new concepts. “We have tenants in our properties who are newer to the retail business, so maybe it’s their eighth store, not their eight-hundredth,” DiCapri said.

On the landlord’s end, there are new shopping center formats to contend with. “In mixed-use, the way retail space is defined is much different than in the regional malls in the past, and if the retail components aren’t open and looking good in time, the whole project suffers,” said Rowe.

Even stand-alone retail developments are more complicated than they used to be. In design terms, some retailers now have very clear and intricate ideas about what they want, all of which has to be executed in detail and on schedule.

“Some retail concepts have a very exacting look — Apple, for example,” said DiCapri. “It has a look that says ‘Apple’ immediately. That retailer has exacting standards when it comes to its design. A retailer’s cutting-edge appearance often reinforces a brand, and there’s a higher level of finish, and quality, to the space these days. A tenant coordinator has to make sure the design is executed to those standards.”

Making sure new awnings, signage, stairs or ramps proceed according to plan and on schedule takes more skill on the parts of coordinators now, to the point that it does not hurt if they are architects or engineers. “A tenant coordinator doesn’t have to have come from a construction background, but a complete knowledge of construction issues is very important,” said Petrie. “With outdoor centers, working out details in the field usually involves construction issues.”

Yet Karen Scott, a senior associate at The Greeby Cos., has neither a design nor a construction background. Her communication skills and property management experience, however, are indispensable to her as retail tenant coordinator at the 2.8 million-square-foot Time Warner Center, in New York City, which includes the 337,000-square-foot Shops at Columbus Circle. The project’s developer, the New York City-based Related Cos., retained her company to oversee the retail tenant fit-out.

The project’s unusual combination of experienced mall tenants and smaller designer boutiques required, above all, an ability to shift gears quickly, Scott says. “One minute you’re talking practically, about how you run an exhaust [system],” she said. “The next minute you’re talking to a designer trying to create a branded image.”