Private Office Space with Short Term Leasing Options Claimed

Rose Sgarlato with Agency Network   https://agencynetworknj.com

Agency Network’s newly constructed office suites offer exclusivity, privacy and productivity.  High-end design with modern functionality that elevates your business.  Short- term leases available starting at three-months includes all amenities:  hosted reception, WiFi, conference area, training room and assigned parking spot.

Video Transcription:

Hi, this is Elizabeth Gearhart with Fireside. I’m here with Rose Sgarlato. Rose has high-end, flexible, perfect workspaces for serious individuals who are running their businesses. And also for corporations who have overflow. It’s not only private and clean, it’s also brand new. So hi Rose. Tell us all about it.

Hi Elizabeth, thank you for having me. Well, you described it wonderfully. Thanks, Agency Network is our name. We’re in Fairfield, New Jersey on Horseneck Road, conveniently located right off of Route 46, yet in a nice sort of quiet area, but accessible to roadways. And we introduced the space less than a year ago, and we basically are a flexible workspace, which offers all private offices, new and clean. Many of them never used before. We have about 17 suites. A few of them are occupied. And we’re an all in one set up.

So you come in and they’re beautifully furnished, very upscale. And the all amenities are included. It’s terms for you. So for each that’s the beauty of the space that unlike a traditional lease, you can have flexible lease terms. So you can start at three months and if you’re happy, extend to whatever you’d like to extend. So we offer the benefit of having unique space, as I said, brand new with nice stylish details, but amenities that are all inclusive in the price of your rent.

What are the amenities?

Yeah, the amenities. Good question. So your wifi is included, which is a fantastic deal for anybody who has their own business, or even in your home. You know, you pay quite a fee for wifi. So right off the top, that’s an amenity that’s included with a monthly price and the rate, the prices range, if I may say from 800 to 1000 dollars, depending on the size of the suite. They’re roughly 150 square feet to 200 and they have one desk in them, most of them. And then some of them have two. So if you have a partner that you work with, or an assistant, you can have a two desk suite, and they’re very much distanced so that we are adhering to all social distancing and office distancing protocol today. And as I mentioned earlier, they’re clean. So some of the amenities are the wifi we will have on our reception/host area. And with that, we call it a hosted reception. So someone greets your guests when they come in, if you have clients, and announces to you that ‘Elizabeth is here to see you for your four o’clock’ a beautiful waiting area. We collect your mail and distribute it to you. We have scanning and copying, that’s a cost to each client per document, but the reception, the electricity, all utilities, including the wifi are in the cost of the monthly fee as well as 24-7 access to the building.

So you are welcome to come in. If you’d like to work on the weekend or in the evening, we are here, manning the ship nine to five to coordinate what you need, but prior, and after those hours and weekends, you may come in when you like to work.

Yeah. So for instance, if you’re an attorney who has to scan something by midnight Saturday night and email it off…

Yes, you have your key card, and we are in a very private, as I said, location. So people feel very safe coming into the building. My company is a property management company. So it is our building. So we maintain it well. We’re on staff here. So that’s our business, really giving people premiere service and property in their locations. And this was traditional office space that we reinvented and recreated. And, you know, some might say it was inspired by coworking, which has of course been the trend for many property owners in the office space, to build a better model, a more flexible model than traditional office space. And we did that. And so it was inspired by that. But again, the sole difference is that ours are private suites. They’ve always been individual. What we do have that is shared is event space that fits up to about 50 people with movable tables and chairs. So that’s a flex space, too. It has a small stage and it has audio visual capabilities. So we’ve done presentations there. So the, I call them clients rather than tenants, the clients that are here can book our event space if they’re having a training room. That is also an amenity and the conference room sits up to about eight people.

So with your office suite comes the added value of the event space and the conference room for meetings, training, seminars.

How many people do you have right now.

As we speak, we have about half the suites occupied. There’s 16 of them. So we have close to about half. And people come and go as they please. So I do have, as I said, a gentleman moving in on Thursday and his story is interesting. He’s a hedge fund manager from Manhattan, and he was commuting from Wayne. So I should say his office was in Manhattan. And prior to early in the winter, he said to his office, I do not want to be commuting into Manhattan anymore. I want a more convenient and local office. So this was prior to everything that went on and he found us through the internet and started to do some research and did some comps of other flex office spaces and just really chose us over others, that we met his needs.

So is that the typical kind of occupant, somebody who’s maybe got a more high end job and really just needs a place to work. I mean, it’s so different working from home than working from work.

I think we can appeal to the person, like you said, who maybe was working at home and needs to expand their, brand. And we call it elevate your brand, right? If you have a client coming to see you, or you’re going to go visit, you know, Starbucks, isn’t always the answer. These places get noisy. So if you’re ready to bring your business to the next level, and you’re a solopreneur is the word, and you’ve been working remotely, which of course is very common. And very smart in an economic sense to work at home. If you’re ready to sort of build your brand and you need other features like Agency Network offers, for example, the conference room and the event space, and you want to impress your client, this is a great step up. And it’s affordable because you’re not getting locked into a longterm lease with common area maintenance fees. This is just one price all in, and you bring your computer. You want to bring a couple of file cabinets. That’s fine. You can bring your deck. You can bring your, you know, sort of personal accoutrements to make your space yours, but we take care of the rest. You have your lock to your door, but we take care of cleaning the suites, of course, on a regular basis, we take care of all of the, what we call property management. So that’s what makes it both affordable to a solopreneur and makes it easy to make that next step and that jump. For the corporations like you so nicely said in the beginning, flexible workspace is the alternative to when you need more prop, you need more real estate, you don’t have enough office space and you need to outsource your people, outsource your real estate, your office space, and you need to place people, whether they’re coming from another state to work. So some of the larger corporations, I would say, mid to larger corporations, have often used flexible workspaces on a temporary basis. And then there’s business services. Like you mentioned, the lawyers. And we have a couple of insurance people in here that are insurance managers who have teams of people. And so they work out of our office and sometimes they’re on the road seeing different clients. So we also have a great organization here that joined us in January, the North Jersey Chamber of Commerce. And Michelle Vernuccio is the director of that.

And interestingly enough, Michelle was one of the first people that I contacted when we introduced the space, because we wanted to make friends with our business community. And I said, well, I’m going to go to a chamber. And Michelle was one of the first people that I met and we joined the chamber and she then turned around and said, I absolutely love the space. And she moved. She had a three suite office and a couple of assistants that work on and off, interns as well. And she basically found a way to sort of consolidate and bring her business, her headquarters here. She was in Totowa. And she has two offices here, they’re one right across from another. And it really works out well to what she does. And as she said, it really totally elevated her presence.

And not her presence, her brand and she’s comfortable working here and feels good. And that’s what I think is important.

It sounds like the perfect solution for a lot of people. And the other thing though, I wanted to talk about, we are in the season of Corona right now, and we are in shutdown, but we won’t always be like this, but as things open up people aren’t going to want to get together in huge groups anymore.

Right.

Your conference room sounds like it’s going to be perfect for those initial meetings where you’re only going to want 10 or 20 people there. So, or not your conference room, I’m sorry, your event space. So let’s say I was a tenant there, and I wanted to have an event there with 20 people because breaking back in, what do I do for the catering?

I’m glad you said this to me because you asked me about amenities. And one of our amenities is that we have a cafe at the base of the building. And the tenants and, or somebody who previously may have just rented the event space, which is also available, the conference space and the event space is available to an outside person by the hour. Again, this is a pre-Covid kind of conversation. We have a cafe downstairs that is able to cater. They’ve done breakfasts and lunch for us. And there are many local area restaurants and catering places that we can suggest and help with our clients. So yes,

People could bring in their own food if they wanted to as well. Right?

Yes. I’ve had that. One of the ways we started, one of the big things that Agency Network does, an agenda of mine has been business networking. So initially when we introduced the space, in addition to reaching out to people like Chambers of Commerces, and we actually just kept connecting to people and we were building a networking center here if you will. Thus the word Agency Network. We were trying to build a business community. It’s always been a goal, not just to offer private office space, but to have a business sort of resource center here, a place where people can learn about business communities, learn about new avenues that might help their businesses. So we featured different speakers. We had LinkedIn workshops here with experts and they’ve been managed differently. I’ve hosted them, Sid Vaidya from Switch Networking. So one of the first things we’ve done has focused on networking. We offered our events space to different networking people like Sid to host groups here. And I host a group called business class with other people, Sid hosts a group, and we’ve had different business professionals come through here and meet and talk about ideas and just typical networking.

So that was one of the initial things we did almost a year ago to introduce the space to people and to say it’s available. Now what the beauty of the room in the back and the events room is that yes, we could safely social distance wearing masks. We could have, and keep people safely in that room, six feet apart, without an issue, we have chairs, we have tables that move. And instead of someone using the conference room that only fit about eight people, they could take those eight or 10 people and equally go in the event space and have their conference there. Because I do believe, like you said, Elizabeth, that we’re not going to remain with this. The video was fantastic, but I think at one point teams are going to have to congregate and meet in safe measures. And I believe that’s going to start happening again very soon that people are going to be safe about meeting, but there will be in person meetings again, just adjusted to the new protocols.

Right. I think so. And I think starting small and slow with a place like you have, that’s so clean and new too.

We started this and, you know, we were, we have a business plan and we were casting the net to see who is the ideal Agency Network client. And it definitely a is a broader picture. It can be that solopreneur. It can be that private hedge fund person who’s working for a company and the company will be billed. It can be a cooperation or that human resources person that needs to place a couple of people coming in for working on a project for a few months.

Or it can be almost like a government branch, like a chamber that services businesses. So it can be that as well. We’ve learned that. That we can accomodate a range, that people can take a few offices if they have a team that’s larger than two or three people. So we have that.

So it’s really nice. You really work with the people. And I think it’s really great that they get to use the conference room and the event space for free.

And that is the amenity. When you asked me about amenities, I certainly, I spaced a little bit on it because we’re under talking conference room and events, but actually in the beginning of the project where we were over-talking that, because that was a draw, you know, and even for me, I work in a space here.

I have my office and then sometimes I get up and I go by in the back and I’ll sit on the couch or I’ll sit on a big table just because I want a change of scenery. And I’m back there by myself. So I think that it does afford people a beautiful scene, we’re surrounded by greenery. This is what’s interesting because we’re on this Horseneck Road, which a couple of miles in one direction is Montville. Fairfield is right here, and we were adjacent to 46, but we’re off of it. So we’re really in a very secluded I want to say a secluded spot, although Horseneck, again, is almost like right adjacent to 46, but there’s no overflow of that traffic. So what happens here is that because it’s a three floor building and Agency Network takes over most of the second floor, we have our private offices upstairs, and downstairs, on the lower level, we have a few tenants, including the cafe. There isn’t a ton of people coming in and out of here. So it’s not a big office park. Everybody at Agency Network gets an assigned parking spot. So you have your own parking spot and your own sort of way to enter the building. So I believe that a lot of the qualities that we have are even more in fashion, if you will in vogue now than they were, when we started the project, they’re more of a, they’re more of a want, you know, smaller building, smaller entries, privacy you know, that’s what we have. The non-condensed vibe is what everybody wants, so secluded, exclusivity. So we have the differentiator of us rather than a coworking traditional, or even, I will say, a Regus, which might be compared to this sort of mentality here is that we are a private freestanding building in a big parking lot private ownership. and there’s that level of safety, cleanliness. And again, privacy,more of a suburban feel, I would say, as well. The greenery, I’m looking at the trees now. And even the events space is surrounded by windows and there’s all greenery. So the offices with windows have all greenery backdrops. So I think that that’s appealing rather than traditional office space.

Right? So a We Work, or even to some extent, a Regus is going to appeal to entrepreneurs who are maybe starting out and who need the energy of other people, it sounds like you’re more directed towards the C level executive type of person.

Yeah. Best we are. I would absolutely say that. You know, again, the price range is between 800 to a thousand dollars a month, all in though. That’s again, all in. So that has to fit to your budget, right? So sometimes it is again for a more established professional corporation or business.

Well, I know one thing that you’re offering that you’re not, you get it at Regus, but you don’t get at We Work that notches you up a level is the receptionist, when people walk in.

Yes.

So many people want to see that, but to hire one, a receptionist for yourself is going to be more than a thousand a month.

Yes. And we handle all the packages. We’re like a doorman, UPS, whatever they’re getting delivered from carriers, they all come through to the front desk. And then we notify our clients that they have a package. We also started a virtual mailbox addition as another service of ours for people that we’re just kicking off. But all of the flexible work space features, if you will, I believe stem from a different culture today of working. The culture is not nine to five, traditional. People are working remotely. They’re on the road, they’re coming and going as they please. And I think that’s why these workspaces appeal to both corporations and individuals, because they are much more modern take, they’re more comfortable. And might I add that our space is beautifully designed. And that to me is another differentiator. I honestly can say that the website is www.Agency NetworkNJ.com. As soon as you enter the space, the doors are all glass that there’s some of them behind me and the wall and that glass feature we have frosting in between. So it’s private, but they’re beautifully done. And the integrity of the design, the owner really has a very high aesthetic and he built the floors to represent that, they chose all the finishings to represent that.

And I have not really been to too many offices that I’ve seen this kind of upscale feature yet privacy. So I think that that’s also, certain people are drawn to that ascetic. So the people that I have in here were completely drawn to it. And especially my first tenants, clients, they were in Fairfield in an office space for years, and very serendipitously their lease was up and they were on the market for a newer arrangement where each one of them could be responsible for their own rent. They didn’t want to do six people in an office, all sharing. So they came here and they all took their own office. So they each have their own agreement. And they were just really impressed by the price value of what you get here for what you’re paying for the comparable office space in the areas of the Caldwell’s Fairfield, Wayne. Parsippany, Verona.

This really gives you an excellent price value relationship. From the amenities like you first mentioned to the aesthetic and to the service of what you’re getting for the price value is incomparable. You’re not gonna get that in another office space.

And I see natural light behind you do all the offices have windows and natural light?

There are interior offices that do not have a window, an exterior, like mine, does have a window, and behind me, yeah. You’re seeing the reflection of the windows. And then all of them though, have this glass exterior so it’s not a wall. You actually have a glass door that you open, everyone has their own key. We do not go in your office, they’re your offices and each office has a number, so pick a number and that’s yours and you have that office and your mail gets coordinated to that office. You have your own mailbox where you can get your mail each day. It’s distributed as well as your parking space and number, number four, coordinates with number four. So it’s very streamlined to make it easy.

If somebody wanted to take a look now, could they do it online virtually?

Yes, they could do it online. I believe the website has great pictures. I would suggest that they call and I can actually do a virtual tour of what offices are available and free. There are quite a few that are brand new that have never been occupied. So again, we’re in this field less than a year, so it took us a couple of months to get the traction of people coming in. And then Michelle moved in, so we were building this up and then we went into that March period where obviously it was stopped for work at home.

So we certainly weren’t pushing our office space, but now we’re in a perfect position to really, you know, I wouldn’t even say pivot, but say we were always private office space. We were always having that feature. And so somebody can call directly the phone number which is (973) 227-0046. My name is Rose. They can speak to me and I’m happy to give them a video tour with either Zoom or my phone. As well as they are welcome to come in and wear a mask as we do when we’re in our common areas, and I can give them a personal tour as well. So we’re open to either one, it’s up to your comfort level. Everybody has a different comfort level with this.

So we’re taping this on June 9th, 2020, I assume in a couple of weeks that people will be able to move more freely. So if somebody were to, by the time this gets on the site and people see it, if somebody were to come and talk to you, they could probably move in pretty soon. Right?

Correct. We are definitely open to those that are transitioning and may need a space just for two months and want to get out of their summer, want to get out of their house because they’re not going back to their offices right away. Each, person, each company, and each person has a different need, and a different, a business model. And I think, like you said before, we really tailor it to them. What we don’t do here is we don’t lease spaces for the day. So I believe honestly, there is an even bigger audience right now for this type of space. As I said to you before, I believe that there will be people who will not be returning to Manhattan necessarily, but doesn’t mean that they want to work in their house.

So if they’re able to work here, build their companies, that’s a great scenario. We can accommodate them until they’re ready to go back to New York or not.

Anything else we need to say before we sign off?

I thank you for introducing such a great idea of the video directory for businesses. And I’m pleased to be one of the first people, like you said, in the real estate section possibly, right?

Yes. You are the first, yes.

I invite anyone who’s interested in a conversation or a video tour to please call us to see if it’s a property and the office that works for you. And just sort of a different experience making going to the office a pleasant one and an easy one and a seamless one.