NKF team helps landlord beat vacant space crunch.

One Hicksville, N.Y., landlord recently dealt with a vacant-space crisis with the assistance of Newmark Knight Frank. The successful outcome involved the leasing of more than 45 percent of the owners' portfolio in just eight months.

Fore Improvement Corp., a family business headed by siblings Arlene and Stanley Broadwin, owns a five-acre industrial park on Commercial Street in the heart of this Nassau County community.

The Hicksville Industrial Park is made up of 12 8,000 s/f to 26,000-s/f freestanding, office and industrial buildings totaling approximately 140,000 square feet. Most of the buildings were initially constructed by the company in the mid-1950s; many of them have been occupied by the same tenants for nearly 30 years. The Broadwin family had successfully handled all the leasing for its park on an in-house basis during the past five decades. But in early 2006, the normally 100 percent-occupied properties were hit hard when tenants in two of the buildings went out of business, leaving some 38,600 square feet-worth of vacant space behind.

Historically, the Broadwins' marketing effort to fill the vacancies included sending flyers to members of the local brokerage community. One of them landed on the desk of Newmark Knight Frank managing director Daniel Gazzola.

He scheduled a meeting with the Broadwins to speak with them about engaging Newmark Knight Frank to exclusively market the park's vacant space.

"Stanley told me they'd never used an exclusive broker before, and they had always been able to fill their spaces effectively on their own," said Gazzola. "But I was able to convince him that it was in their best interests to list the property exclusively with us."

Working with Newmark Knight Frank managing principal Chuck Tabone and Associate Director Richard Falco, Gazzola began marketing the vacant space in the Commercial Street park in February 2006.

As activity was picking up with likely prospects for leasing, the Broadwins received disappointing news. One of the major tenants--that had been there for 30 years--had to downsize quickly, leaving 20,300 s/f vacant. Shortly thereafter, another tenant unexpectedly ceased operations, vacating another 4,100 s/f--leaving approximately 63,000 s/f in the park vacant and available for lease.

"All of a sudden, almost half the park was vacant," said Gazzola. It was "all hands on deck" time--and the Newmark Knight Frank team proceeded to demonstrate how valuable an experienced brokerage team can be to a landlord--in this case, by coming up with an alternate pricing strategy and marketing plan that was instrumental in filling all of the vacant space in the industrial park in a short period of time, according to Gazzola.

"We'd never used an exclusive broker before--we've always done our leasing by ourselves," said Arlene Broadwin.

"But after Dan's [Gazzola's] presentation, we decided to give Newmark Knight Frank a try, and found their services were exactly what we needed to get our vacant space in front of qualified prospects--and we had a great time working with them in the process."