Category Archives: Boston Office Space

0 LogMeIn CEO rethinks corporate headquarters for a post-COVID era

Posted on by

By Jon Chesto | Boston Globe 

As few as one out of five employees will spend all workdays in the office

Six months ago, LogMeIn chief executive Bill Wagner never would have imagined he would hire his next chief financial officer without meeting him in person first. Wagner would have said that’s crazy.

Not anymore. Sure, we live in crazy times now. But some changes won’t be temporary. The ones playing out at LogMeIn, one of Boston’s biggest tech companies and a key player in the remote-work software business, illustrate just how different the office scene in Boston could be once this pandemic finally ends.

All 700-plus of Wagner’s Boston employees work remotely right now — like most of Boston’s white-collar workforce — and they will continue to do so until October. But some won’t ever return to LogMeIn’s headquarters. Only a small portion will work all five weekdays at the main offices along both sides of Summer Street in Fort Point.

How few? Wagner said he expects 20 percent to return five days a week after the pandemic is over. One in five. Let that sink in for a moment. Sure, many colleagues will come in less frequently, but others will be essentially remote workers all of the time. The breakdown won’t be known for months, probably not until a vaccine is widely available.

Wagner predicts LogMeIn’s corporate office will become more of a place for team meetings, training sessions, and similar get-togethers and less of a place where people dutifully show up every morning at 9 to grind out another workday.

Wagner said it’s far too early to know what this means for the 230,000 square feet LogMeIn leases in Fort Point — how much he’ll need, how it will be reconfigured. Even harder for Wagner to predict: What will happen to all the lunch places, bars, and other businesses that serve all the workers who used to arrive like clockwork?

This isn’t primarily about saving money, Wagner said, even though cost savings could be found. (A spokeswoman says some savings would be redeployed to help equip home offices.)

Instead, Wagner said he’s keen on letting employees work where they want to work. LogMeIn surveyed its 3,700 employees worldwide. About 3,200 responded. Of those, only 5 percent said they want to be in the office five days a week. People like the flexibility they have now, he said. They are sleeping and exercising more. And many say they are more productive now that they no longer spend hours commuting.

But employees still miss the social aspects of office life, Wagner said. That’s one reason why Wagner envisions adopting a hybrid model, of sorts.

The shift also significantly widens the pool of talent available. Existing employees might be able to move to another state if they want. In fact, Wagner said his chief of staff, Chris Perrotti, plans to do exactly that: He is moving to his Vermont home. And new hires don’t need to move to Boston. They just need to be in the same time zone.

Case in point: the new chief financial officer. LogMeIn is expected to be acquired by summer’s end by two private equity firms, Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital, in a deal valued at $4.3 billion when it was announced in December. Wagner wanted someone with experience taking a company private to replace Ed Herdiech, whose retirement was announced last fall. Rich Veldran, the new CFO, fit the bill: He guided the financial information provider Dun & Bradstreet when that company went private.

LogMeIn’s interviews with Veldran were conducted remotely. Like many other CEOs, Wagner considers the chief financial officer to be the number two job, the top lieutenant. Veldran still lives in New Jersey. (He joined LogMeIn on June 15.) While Veldran may get an apartment in Boston, Wagner said he doesn’t expect his right-hand man to have to pick up and move here.

The increasing acceptance of remote work was already under way, Wagner said. COVID-19 just accelerated it. Companies are under pressure to reduce their carbon footprints, to shave real estate and travel expenses, and to hire more diverse workforces. Going remote can help accomplish all three goals.

Sure, Wagner is a bit biased here. He does, in fact, sell software geared specifically for this kind of transition: LastPass, join.me, the entire GoTo suite. Sales have surged through the pandemic, although LogMeIn did make some technology available for free to nonprofits and government agencies.

Executives at other white-collar companies are pondering similar questions. And some are acting.

The real estate brokerage Colliers reported that companies put nearly 900,000 square feet of office space in Boston on the sublease market for the first time in the second quarter. That’s the highest number since 2004 — when corporate giants Fleet and John Hancock were gobbled up within a 12-month time frame — and the third-highest of any quarter since 1990.

(Side note from Aaron Jodka of Colliers: With the exception of a 100,000-square-foot chunk of space opening up at Tripadvisor’s headquarters in Needham, Boston’s suburban office market seems stable right now.)

LogMeIn was a trendsetter back when it relocated from Woburn to Boston in 2013, as suburban companies decamped for the big city in the hunt for talent. It became a flagship member of the city’s Innovation District, the branding applied at the time to Fort Point and nearby environs in the Seaport. The following year, the company even secured $2.5 million in city tax breaks and nearly $1.1 million in state tax credits to help pay for an expansion there.

Now, LogMeIn might be leading a new kind of trend as it rethinks its corporate headquarters, and this one might have even bigger consequences for the Boston economy.

0 Why Go To The Office? Few Want To — Some Need To

Posted on by

By Liz Neisloss | WGBH | July 20, 2020

Downtown Boston’s office buildings loom over urban canyons, now echoing with the occasional complaint of a seagull. It’s the third phase of reopening in the state — which allows offices to fill to 50 percent capacity — and these buildings are mostly empty because their usual occupants are staying away.

“I park underneath the Prudential Complex. It’s the second largest garage north of New York City. It’s a ghost town,” said Wil Catlin, managing director of Boston Realty Advisors.

Catlin, who heads the company’s downtown office leasing team, estimated that the majority of workers in Boston’s “urban core” — 82 million square feet of office space — haven’t returned.

“On a good day,” he said, his own Back Bay office is “maybe 18 percent” full.

Catlin said he thinks many workers are deterred by fear of coronavirus exposure during the commute.

“People might feel safe in the office at the Prudential Complex, but they don’t feel safe getting to the office. So that usually is the part that creates the most amount of anxiety for the commuter,” Catlin said. “They might be commuting on the commuter rail. They might be commuting on the subway. They might be commuting on a bus. That’s the fear.”

And once at the office building, there’s no more squeezing in the elevator like in the old days. Catlin described the process for a typical large downtown building.

“So if there’s four people to an elevator, each person has to face the wall,” he said. “It is a cumbersome amount of time just to get in the elevator and then just to get upstairs.”

But what if work can’t be done from the kitchen table? The greater Boston area has many scientists — what companies call “building-dependent workers” — who have had to return to their labs, for example. But even there, routines have changed.

Mandatory mask-wearing is just the start of the changes at Agios Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. Inside the lobby, a security guard with a clipboard runs visitors through a brief health questionnaire to ask about any recent rides on public transport or exposure to anyone with COVID-19. Employees can use an app to self-report when they come in. All entrants then lean into a stand for a quick temperature check and a pump of disinfectant for their hands. Once through those steps, it’s one person at a time in their lobby elevators.

Agios develops medicines to treat cancer and rare diseases, and the majority of their employees are based in Cambridge, where lab scientists represent just over 10 percent of the workforce.

“We’re running experiments in support of the discovery of those medicines. And so in order to run those experiments, we need to be in the building. And those are really a critical part at the core of what we do as a company,” said Agios Chief People Officer Melissa Mclaughlin.

Before entering the lab, as always, rubber gloves go on, along with lab coats and goggles. Since masks are now required, the goggles are now anti-fog. But lab scientists are used to protective gear and precautions. The most dramatic change here is in how much time they can spend in the lab.

On a recent day, Bo Wang sat alone at the lab bench in what’s known as the “wet lab.” Wang is researching potential therapeutics for leukemia. He can now only work a half day at a time and leaves by noon so there’s no contact with the next shift. Wang says he feels safe at work, but he wishes he could stay longer.

“It limits the work we can do, but also I miss seeing the other people, seeing my friends and colleagues. I’m only seeing half of the people, unfortunately. So that’s probably hard, hard for our communication and science exchange,” Wang said.

In an adjacent cell culture lab, there are multiple stations, but researcher Gabrielle McDonald is solo. She’s studying the activity of genes as part of her cancer research. To an outsider, it appears to be work suited for one, but employees here describe research — which requires collaboration — as a “team sport.”

“It’s very different to have just me by myself or me and one other person. So, it’s really quiet. It’s hard to get used to. I kind of miss having other people around,” McDonald said.

As soon as they finish their allotted shifts, these scientists have to leave the office and continue work from home. Collaboration has shifted online.

“If you’re coming in to run an experiment in the lab, you come in and you run the experiment. You may write up that at home, you may do meetings when you get home to talk about the experiments. So really, what needs to happen at the building should happen,” McLaughlin said.

Outside of these specialized labs, the Agios offices are mostly empty. If employees can do their work from home, it’s still the preferred approach.

Dave Madson, director of workplace for design firm CBT, is familiar with the challenge of getting employees back to the office during a pandemic.

“For those that have started to go back, it is very slow and deliberate,” Madson said, “It really is quite a sparse and slow return.”

And until social distancing is no longer required, most companies won’t be able to fit more than 50 or 60 percent of staff in the office at a time.

“The idea of every person on a staff coming in at the same time until there’s a vaccine — it’s probably not going to happen for nearly every company. I think that would be quite difficult to achieve with the current guidelines and rules in place,” Madson said.

Madson looks at floor plans to see what measures are needed to create “a safe environment,” he said. Not surprisingly, this includes creating signage, estimating room capacities and knowing where sanitation stations are needed.

“One of the most onerous parts of this is really air filtration and fresh air ventilation that’s in many of these high-rises. That isn’t something where they can simply just turn up the fans or open the windows,” Madson said.

For now, it seems, whatever the work, there’ll be no gathering at the water cooler for office gossip. In addition to the physical changes at offices, Madson said, communication with staff and putting in place COVID-era rules are essential.

“There’s a lot of education that needs to happen,” Madson said, ”to make sure everybody is on the same page and what you can expect when you do come back to the office.”

The return to the office, he said, is “a sort of psychological experience” that workers need to prepare for.

0 ‘We Were Way High’: Reality Of Phased Office Comeback Falls Short Of Landlord Expectations

Posted on by

Dees Stribling | Bisnow | July 14, 2020 

Office space has been open in Massachusetts since Phase 1 of the commonwealth’s reopening plan went into effect on May 25, but office workers and their managers aren’t rushing to return. That doesn’t mean they never will, just that the uncertainty is still too strong.

During the early days of the pandemic closures, the expectation was that reopening, when it occurred, would be a series of relatively quick steps up, Oxford Properties Group U.S. Head of Office Chris Mundy said on Bisnow’s Boston Office Update: Subleasing, Retail and the Evolving Market webinar last week.

Those steps would begin at perhaps 25% of pre-pandemic occupancy and then move up to 50% and 75%, Mundy said.

“Candidly, we were way high,” he said. “There’s really been caution among the office tenants in coming back.”

In Boston, the current total at Oxford Properties’ portfolio is about 5% of pre-pandemic occupancy, according to Mundy, who said the Canadian pension fund-owned Oxford saw similar numbers in New York and Washington, D.C. Rent collection for those offices is almost 100%, however, he added.

Uncertainty is the guiding factor in workers staying away, and it is still weighing heavily on forecasts for office owners like Oxford.

“There’s a lot of speculation about what the impact of the pandemic will be, but there’s a wide range of [possible] outcomes, so it is hard to make long-term decisions,” Mundy said.

Office workers who can work at home have adapted to the new reality, and until the coronavirus pandemic is under control, they don’t see any reason to work in an office — and their bosses don’t either.

That is true even in a state like Massachusetts, where the number of COVID-19 cases has flattened, as opposed to the spikes in places like Arizona or Florida. In early July, new cases in the Bay State totaled fewer than 100 many days, compared with well over 2,000 new cases per day during much of April.

Also, since mid-April, the seven-day average for the positive coronavirus test rate is down 94%, and the three-day average of hospitalized patients was down 84% Monday, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Earlier this month, the commonwealth rolled out Phase 3 of the reopening of the state’s economy. That phase isn’t about office space but allowed some kinds of retail, such as movie theaters and health clubs.

The reluctance to return to office space directly affects central business district retail and restaurants, which need office workers, but also students and tourists, Boston Realty Advisors Managing Director and partner Whitney Gallivan said. Boston is going to have a lot fewer of all of those for an uncertain while.

“Every retailer that we talk to, and every landlord that we speak to, is doing something different,” Gallivan said, adding that landlords are trying to keep the tenants they have if at all possible.

“The bottom line is that they’re trying to work together,” she said. “If you have to refill a vacant space, there’s not much activity out there. Some, but not enough to let these tenants go.”

Retail rental payment has been between 40% and 60%, with properties leasing to grocery stores and pharmacies toward the upper end of that spectrum, Gallivan said.

Though there are a number of possible outcomes to the current situation, and uncertainty is the norm for now, it is also probably a mistake to believe that all of the adaptations to the pandemic will be permanent, such as a majority of workers working at home full time, Mundy said.

He told the story of a tech tenant whose CEO was considering giving up on office space and going 100% remote, which would have been a loss for Oxford Properties. But it also would have meant a loss in cohesion for the company’s workforce, the CEO came to realize.

“The CEO started to share the idea with his senior team, and one of his top lieutenants said, ‘That’s great, I’m moving to Idaho.’ The CEO said, ‘I don’t know how I feel about that,'” Mundy said, and he rethought his plan.

Different aspects of the pandemic probably will stay, however, especially in the retail world, such as takeout windows or the convenience of having items brought out to one’s car, Gallivan said, noting also that online platforms are going to get stronger.

“It may be hard to go back to [having] to walk into the store, take my kid out of the car and go pick this up,” she said.

People will want to keep the alternatives they’ve gotten used to during the pandemic.

Surviving retailers and restaurants will come out of this period a stronger business, Gallivan said, since they will have learned practices that help the consumer.

0 Coworking Company Workbar Expanding to Boston’s South Shore

Posted on by

Coworking – Some are expanding while others are giving backspace.

By Connect Boston | June 26, 2020

Boston-based coworking company Workbar is expanding to Boston’s South Shore.

The firm will open its 10th area location at 101 Accord Park in Norwell on July 1. The 10,000-square-foot location is being developed by JEI Ventures. The space will be housed in an office building on Route 3.

Workbar currently has locations in Back Bay, Downtown Boston, Burlington, Arlington, Needham and Salem. The company has attempted to make members feel safe during the COVID-19 pandemic by adding sanitation stations as well as adding more private office space as compared to a mostly open floorplan.

0 The Future of Office Amidst Covid-19

Posted on by

 

Moderated by Wil Catlin (Boston Realty Advisors) with a star-studded panel, including Michael Maturo (RXR Realty); Matthew Friedman (Rockwood Capital); Arthur Jones (Principal Real Estate Investors); and Robert Deckey (Invesco US)

ABOUT THE VIRTUAL EVENT

iGlobal Forum Live introduces a brand-new virtual event, providing you with key insights into the Offices market.

This 1-hour discussion is the perfect opportunity to delve into this key commercial real estate sector with industry leaders, both from asset management and acquisition standpoints, enabling you to get solutions you can take back and use in real time.

Key topics include:

  • Flex-space and Space-As-A-Service feel highly relevant, yet how can they survive new health requirements?
  • Will tenants downsize and relocate to minimize costs? Or will they create grand offices that are branding exercises to draw people back together?
  • What are asset management teams doing to protect portfolios in this C-19 environment?
  • What solutions are available for elevators?
  • How much will operating costs increase?
  • How are sector benchmarks or metrics shifting to meet the new Covid-19 reality?
  • In future, will an employer’s location matter less, and if so, what does that mean for the office sector?

Register HERE.

0 Boston launches $6M fund for business reopenings

Posted on by
By   | Boston Business Journal | May 27, 2020

Boston officials have pledged $6 million in grants to support small businesses where employees must work in close proximity with either coworkers or customers — such as hair salons and barber shops, retail stores, gyms and food service establishments — to provide personal protective equipment so those businesses can reopen.

Companies with fewer than 15 employees can apply for up to $2,000 for materials such as masks and safety partitions for customers and employees. The funding will be available in three rounds: first, for personal services including barber shops and hair salons; second, for retail, restaurants, nail salons, day spas, waxing and laser services; and third, for bars, arts and entertainment venues and fitness businesses.

Applications open Thursday at 5:00 p.m. at boston.gov/reopen-fund.

“When our small businesses are ready and able to open, we want our business owners and workers to have access to the appropriate resources to stay safe,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “These additional grants will help level the playing field for Boston’s small businesses and support both our public health and economic equity priorities.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, Walsh stressed that employees should continue to work from home if possible. Workers should not feel pressured to come into work if they don’t feel safe, he said.

“We have to do our part to minimize the risk of another surge,” he said. “It’s not the time to let up.”

0 Re-Imagine Housing Affordability in a Post-Pandemic Boston

Posted on by

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like many cities today, Boston has a shortage of affordable housing. Along with that, the Boston population is expanding significantly faster than housing can be built. What will this mean Bostantonians long term?

Solutions for limited space, reducing project expenses and expediting the preconstruction process all come down to the initial design phase.

Design leaders are approaching policy, incorporating technology to expedite permitting and utilizing space to build smaller units at volume more than every.

Join Bisnow May 26 for a deep dive into how leaders and designers plan to usher in a new and more affordable era through design in Boston CRE.

There will be plenty of time for questions.

If you can’t attend live, register. We will be sending the recording to all registrants.

During this webinar we will discuss:

–What innovative design solutions can reduce housing expenses?

–How do high-density housing models present new opportunities for housing expenses in Boston today?

–How changes in design policy can facilitate new support systems in the inner city?

–What are new ways to approach the limitations of land and build space in downtown Boston?

–How technology is being used to change the design process and eliminate delays that increase development cost?

Register HERE.

0 Study: Rents will fall at downtown office towers

Posted on by
Boston office rents will be affected, but not in the near term. According to CoStar Group, the economic downturn of 2008 started the gradual drop in rents with the bottom of the market occurring in 2010.

By Tim Logan | Boston Globe | May 6, 2020

Rents for office space in downtown Boston could fall sharply this year as companies lay off employees and reassess how and where they work amid the coronavirus outbreak, according to a report out Wednesday.

Estimates from Moody’s Analytics project a 12 percent drop in office rents in the city, one of the five steepest declines in the country, as the impact of the pandemic sweeps through the economy, and particularly through dense downtown business districts like Boston’s.

It would mark the end of a long run-up in rents and demand for office space in central Boston, though the study’s author, Victor Canalog, noted a 12 percent drop would be softer than the crashes of the early 1990s and 2001, and about what the region endured amid the broad economic collapse in 2008 and 2009.

In that context — and given the cratering economy and job market — things could look a lot worse, he said.

“This is the world we live in right now,” said Canalog, who is head of commercial real estate economics at Moody’s. “If we say ‘It’s going to be about as bad as 2008 and 2009,’ that’s actually a good thing.”

But Canalog’s report points to some troubling longer-term trends for cities such as Boston, which thrive on their busy business districts. If employers embrace work-from-home technology, they may ultimately decide they need less office space in general. If, at the same time, they decide they need to spread out workers who do come into the office, it may make sense to relocate to suburban office parks where rents are typically far lower.

“If it’s true that we’re going to reduce footprint, then there are going to be winners and losers,” Canalog said. “A company might not move from Boston to North Dakota. There are good reasons they want to be near Boston. But they might move out of downtown Boston to someplace 20 miles away, where they can get many of the same things.”

But those are longer-term decisions. At the moment, seven weeks into a public health emergency that has shut down big swaths of the region’s economy, the impact on Boston’s office market has been muted.

Few new leases have been signed, in part due to the complications of touring and inspecting space, and also because of the broader economic uncertainty. Several large deals in downtown office towers reportedly nearing completion have been put on hold, or scuttled, while companies reassess the market.

But no companies have publicly backed away from signed deals to move in the next couple of years. Some tenants, particularly in tech and life sciences, continue to look for space. And developers with large towers under construction say they still plan to deliver the buildings, fully leased, if perhaps a bit delayed by construction shutdowns.

So far, building owners have been reluctant to lower rents to lure tenants, said Mark Hickey, director of market analytics in the Boston office of Costar, a real estate data firm. Instead they’re offering more concessions or longer-term leases.

But it appears they could face competition from a growing inventory of sublease space, particularly from tech companies that in recent years gobbled up large blocks of office space for future growth, which they may no longer need and may put out for lease at a discount. The real estate firm Colliers estimates there was 1.6 million square feet of sublease space on the market at the end of April, more than Boston had during the real estate crash of 2009.

Even aside from questions of supply and demand, this experience is likely to change how companies view and use office space, said Aaron Jodka, managing director of research at the Boston office of the real estate firm Colliers. The question is how.

“Do tenants need more space because of distancing requirements? Or less space, because more people are working from home?” he said. “I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.”

0 Boston CRE Doyen Ron Druker: “We’ll Come Back From This”

Posted on by

By Dees Stribling | Bisnow | May 13, 2020

“What keeps you up at night?” a Bisnow webinar audience member asked Ron Druker, Boston commercial real estate luminary and president of The Druker Co.

“Right now, my dog keeps me up at night,” Druker said. “The answer is — I can only control what I can control. Our real estate is good real estate, and even in the depths of all the other recessions, we’ve come back. We’ll come back from this.”

Bisnow’s Boston webinar, A Discussion With Druker Co. President Ron Druker, covered a lot of ground on Tuesday: occupancy and rent collections at the company’s varied portfolio, the history of U.S. economic dislocations going back to World War I, the 1918 Spanish Flu and what landlords should do — and should not do — to meet post-pandemic standards, and his thoughts on the crisis.

“It’s important that we recognize everyone that’s putting themselves on the line, whether it’s truck drivers, UPS, FedEx, nurses, doctors — all the people who are up front,” Druker said. “I think we’re going to be at this for a while.”

The Druker family has been part of Boston real estate for more than a century. Ron Druker’s grandfather, John, got the Drukers into the business nearly 120 years ago, developing the Hotel Kenmore and the Braemore Hotel in Kenmore Square. His son Bertram followed, building the Colonnade Hotel on Huntington Avenue and affordable housing in various parts of Massachusetts.

Ron Druker has carried on the family development business. In the 1980s, his Heritage on the Garden condos were an important part of Back Bay’s resurgence, and in the 2000s, the Atelier 505 development was part of the South End’s revitalization. Most recently, Druker Co.’s 350 Boylston development received approval from the Boston Planning & Development Agency.

Druker, along with co-moderator Wil Catlin of Boston Realty Advisors, spoke about the day some years ago when a startup with big plans wanted to lease an entire building in the Druker Co. portfolio.

The deal gave Druker pause. For one thing, the tenant improvement allowance was about $200/SF, with $70/SF for the lobby and $130/SF for the rest of the space. As an older building, Druker Co. would have also had to spend money on the HVAC system. Those expenses weren’t the worst of it, however. Druker was worried about the company’s long-term staying power.

“I didn’t like the credit, and as it turns out, I’d rather be lucky than good, because they are where they are now,” Druker said.

He nixed the deal. The would-be tenant: WeWork. “They create single-purpose space,” Druker said. “So I guess we were lucky in looking at it the way we did at the time.”

In a less real estate-related anecdote, Druker also mentioned the time he met songwriter and record producer Mark Ronson at a small restaurant in Tokyo, and another time he talked with Keith Richards for two-and-a-half hours at a resort bar in Turks and Caicos. “Two old grandfathers sat and talked about life,” Druker said.

Druker said that in his company’s portfolio, rent payment during the pandemic has varied according to property type. Residential payments have been about 99%, while office payments are in the mid-90% range. Retail, on the other hand, has been at about 50%.

“We’re working with our retail tenants,” he said. “There are smaller retail tenants, some of them real mom-and-pop operations who pay rent predicated on how they did the month before, and we’re working with them. There are other more nationals, and we’re working with them as well.”

With some of the smaller tenants, Druker Co. has specifically tried to help them avail themselves of some of the public subsidies on offer.

“Because we’re not highly leveraged, our portfolio is in good shape, but it’s work,” Druker said. “I’m spending 12 hours a day at my desk. Most of the people I talk to are working harder [than before].”

Regarding the 240K SF project at 350 Boylston, Druker said that his company is making proposals via Zoom, and so far has received two requests for proposals that the company has responded to.

“There’s interest in the building,” Druker said. “The advantage that we have now is that we’re taking steps to make the building more hygienic.”

With only one to four tenants, he said, 350 Boylston will be relatively simple to enter and leave, and that ought to be an advantage for the building as well, he said.

On the other hand, it is possible to go overboard with building modifications in response to the pandemic.

“The protocols relative to cleanliness and social distancing … make sense today,” Druker said. “But to make major physical alterations to a building for something that … will be short term, we don’t believe makes sense.”

0 Bisnow Webinar : How to Get Boston Construction Back Underway

Posted on by

Since Mayor Walsh placed all non-essential construction projects on hold, many contractors and construction workers are still without a clear direction. Recent safety tips advised by the city require 6 feet of social distancing, hand washing accessibility, protective gear, etc. However essential projects have still been actively underway without consistent guidelines of how they need to be managed.

Many are looking to leaders currently on the ground for how they are managing essential projects, crews that are currently out of work and what they need in order to transition back into completing projects.

Join Bisnow May 14 as Bill Olson, director of construction of Wise Construction, Bryan Northrop, executive vice president & general manager of Skanska and Frank Callahan, president of Massachusetts Building Council dive deep into how they are managing crews, handling projects deemed essential and what they believe is needed to get construction back underway.

During this webinar we will discuss:

— How to protect crews for projects currently underway?

— How are leaders managing crews that are out of work while construction is on hold?

— How are leaders managing crews that are out of work while construction is on hold?

— What policy changes are needed for workers and contractors to get hammers swinging?

— What can be done right now to prepare for projects opening up again?

Register HERE.