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open rather than behind closed doors.
“On the tenant side, it’s completely changed,” Stracquatanio said. “We went from thinking this is a place we want to be comfortable in five days a week to thinking, wait a second, this is a little bit more transient — it’s an area where I can come in, collaborate and communicate — but then I still go back home.
“But you still need a space, you still need a place and we felt very strongly about that and have learned a ton over the last almost eight months now that we’ve been in the office.”
As Decillis noted, Stracquatanio and his team were eager to complete the deal and build out the space for another reason: The firm needed
to bring investors to the office to showcase its products and its technology.
“So part of the balance of hybrid — as I’ve learned from Angelo and from his team — is that the nature of business in many cases does truly require a physical presence, from a capital, financing and credibility perspective,” Decillis said.
Schultz, an Onyx co-founder and managing partner, said “it just proves
the two as we go on.”
In the meantime, the pandemic has given landlords another chance to differentiate their buildings, Decillis said. That has meant investing
in lobby and common space renovations, upgraded food service options, new outdoor spaces and other enhancements, catering to a tenant base that will likely be more discerning and more demanding of flexibility.
“Clients have said recently, ‘We don’t just want to come back to the same space. We don’t want to come back to the same building. We want to come back to something that’s better,’” Decillis said.
Schultz, whose firm owns a large portfolio of
high-end office
space in New
back to a building experience that we’ve all spent so many months away from.” At Newark’s 2.3 million-square- foot Gateway Center, where Onyx and its partners own three of the
four buildings, that has also meant upgrading HVAC equipment and other key infrastructure in order to promote a healthy indoor environment, helping it secure a seal of approval from Hackensack Meridian Health.
He noted, however, that returning to the office will be “an experiment” in the near term “until we actually see feedback” from tenants.
“Just like any product, you build something you think everyone likes and you keep iterating, and iterating and iterating until you finally figure out what people need,” Schultz said. “And I think it’s going to be a very interesting next 18 months of that.”
He added: “Our tenants are our lifeline. We’re here to serve. Everyone has a different view, a different fear level of what this is, so until we understand their wants and needs, we can’t really deliver as well as we want to.” RE
Pari Bajpay
that office will be a core, essential resource moving forward,” even
if it remains to be seen how most tenants and industries change their approach to the
physical workplace. Another panelist, Verizon Business’ Pari Bajpay, said that strategy is only starting to take shape for the telecom giant, whose employees are not yet required to be on site at its Basking Ridge campus.
“One of the things that we realized through the pandemic is that not every function requires people to be in the office physically,” said Bajpay, the company’s vice president for business products. “What we also realized is that a lot of functions are performed a whole lot better when you are in the office because you need to connect with people, you need that physical presence, so it’s really going to be a combination of
Jersey, said Onyx is “doing everything possible to make someone feel safe, secure, happy coming
Jon Schultz
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