Newmark Knight Frank team delivers for newspaper firm.

Newmark Knight Frank managing principal Chuck Tabone and managing director Daniel Gazzola have completed a series of transactions enabling Publishers Circulation Fulfillment Inc. (PCF) to restructure and upgrade its distribution network on Long Island, which included five locations throughout Suffolk County, Nassau County and eastern Queens.

Based in Towson, Md., PCF is the largest independent distributor of home- and office-delivered newspapers in the country, expediting the delivery of more than 1.5 million individual copies of local, regional, national and international publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to residences and offices across the nation on a daily basis.

PCF provides the link between the publishing plants of its clients and the carriers who deliver publications to individual subscribers at their homes and offices. The company accomplishes this by working through a network of more than 150 distribution centers located in towns and cities throughout the U.S.

In a space search spanning an 18-month period, Tabone and Gazzola, both of Newmark Knight Frank's Long Island office, helped PCF consolidate from approximately 62,000 total square feet in five distribution centers located in Farmingdale, Freeport, Westbury, Jamaica and Valley Stream. In turn, the company leased three new locations of approximately the same square footage (a little more than 20,000 s/f each) at 303 Smith St. in Farmingdale; 1 Enterprise Place in Hicksville; and 5 Terminal Drive in West Hempstead.

The nature of PCF's business made finding suitable facilities a challenging process, according to Gazzola.

"PCF takes printed publications and distributes them, on a daily basis, to individual carriers, who in turn typically make their deliveries during predawn hours," Gazzola said.

This process calls for relatively small, centrally located distribution buildings that have extremely well-lit parking lots, that can also accommodate anywhere from 100 to 200 cars and/or delivery vans/trucks during the night and earliest hours of the morning, he explained. It also requires landlords that will commit to keeping these parking lots clear of snow and ice for the nighttime hours during which they are most heavily used.

"PCF has a unique operation that requires a very specific geography, type of building, parking facility, and landlord for things to work," said Gazzola.

"It took a while, but eventually we were able to find all these qualities in the three new locations. PCF now realizes significant savings on total rent and through elimination of certain redundancies."

Gazzola represented PCF in each of the three transactions, while Tabone represented the building landlords at the Farmingdale and Hicksville facilities. Representatives of Long Island based Sutton & Edwards represented the landlord in the West Hempstead transaction.