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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Rent-an-office giant helps fill Philly towers

When Google Inc. paid $70 million for Philadelphia-founded advertising software operator Invite Media in 2010, the online-search giant wanted to move the new firm's youthful engineering team to more profesional quarters than their rented startup digs in a worn Center City rowhouse, upstairs from the closed Moon over Miami bar.

To house two dozen engineers and support staff, Google didn't hire a broker. Instead, the company turned to Regus, a UK- and Luxembourg-based multinational with rent-a-suites in more than 500 cities worldwide, including entire floors of Center City's One Liberty and Center Square towers and new space near the airport and key suburbs - around 200,000 square feet in the Philadelphia area, enough to house a midsized corporate headquarters..

Regus pulled down walls from six adjoining offices to present the new Googlers with a bright-painted, wide-open swath of Center Square, complete with a lounge "with comfy chairs," says Lori Brown, the former Saks Fifth Ave. training boss who runs Regus' Philadelphia operations.

In the temporary-sublet-coworking-office world, "we are Nike," Brown added. The publicly-traded firm, headed by Mark Dixon and run from offices in Luxembourg and suburban London, bought its way into Philadelphia with the purchase of the former HQ Global Workplaces nine years ago. The group has office suites in Berwyn, Mount Laurel, Conshohocken, Fort Washington, with clients - from start-ups to personal offices to local units of Glaxo, Microsoft, Cisco and other big companies - employing thousnads of local workers.

Philadelphia, once a banking, railroad and factory center, is now largely a "branch-office town like Atlanta" where national and global companies are constantly looking to house temporary sales an dservice teams, says Donna Scott, Brown's boss as Regus' East Coast market manager.  The recession, she says, has boosted demand for downtown "virtual office" message and shared office space and cubicles. "We call it 'coworking' now, but it's an old concept. People still need a place to come to, to communicate" face-to-face with clients, suppliers, other humans.
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About Joseph N. DiStefano
Joseph N. DiStefano writes this blog to feed his PhillyDeals column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joe has been a member of Bloomberg LP’s New York Finance Team, wrote the book “Comcasted,” taught writing at St. Joseph’s University, and studied economics and history at Penn. Reach Joe at 215-854-5194 and JoeD@phillynews.com
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