February 12, 2001
Think you need to be a high-tech company to land space at the T-Rex Technology Center in Boca Raton?
Think again.
The welcome mat is out for nearly any company needing at least 10,000 square feet in the former IBM complex at Yamato Road and Interstate 95. That’s quite a change from last year, when the property’s new owners were
pitching the place solely as a “telecom hotel.” a warehouse for telecommunications wiring and routing
equipment.
T-Rex, after all, stands for Telecom-Routing Exchange, and its backers saw the high-tech former IBM complex as a natural for the industry.
But that was before the cooling stock market put the telecom business in the deep freeze.
“The capital markets have hammered the industry, “T-Rex Chief Executive Tom Mulroy acknowledged last week.
So, T-Rex’s strategy has changed. “In the last 60 days, we’ve opened it up to office tenants,” Mulroy said. “You have to move with the market.”
T-Rex developers paid $138.65 million last April for the property, formerly called the Blue Lake Corporate Center, (T-Rex briefly linked up with Miami developer Manny Medina of Terremark, but parted ways in January.)
Since buying the complex, T-Rex has landed only one major deal, an expansion of tenant Verlo Inc. It’s kept a low profile, except for a recent land sale to the city of Boca Raton. But that does not mean the 247-acre office park is dormant.
T-Rex has been repaving parking lots, installing landscaping and signs, preparing retail space and generally sprucing up the property.
The company also is finishing a $6 million roofing job on the 1.8 million-square-foot complex’s 33 acres of connected buildings, one of the largest roofing jobs in the country.
T-Rex President, Clifford Preminger said the company’s first focus wasn’t leasing, but maintenance and improvements, a big issue with tenants.
Now T-Rex is ready for a leasing push and has hired Tim Vallace of Lancore Realty as its on-site leasing agent.
The company is planning a marketing campaign that will include a Web site and brochures.
All this doesn’t mean T-Rex has given up on the telecom business. Mulroy said the T-Rex center, built for companies that do high-speed, high-power computer work, “is still a perfect telecom facility.’
He considers those tenants the center’s first priority.
In fact, one tenant, Web hosting company Verio, just agreed to more than double its space, to 150,000 square feet from 70,000, Mulroy called the deal a coup for T-Rex.
Verio will build a huge data canter, Mulroy said, an investment he pegged at “north of 40 to 50 million dollars, Verio is a unit of NTT Communications, the Japanese telephone giant.
To make the place even more attractive to telecom companies that use a lot of electricity and need backup power, T-Rex is building another sub station at the site.
It will be able to deliver 200 watts of power to each square foot. Average offices use about 8 to 12 watts a square foot, Mulroy said.
T-Rex so far has spent $18 million on upgrades, and probably will spend another $18 million before all the work is done, Mulroy said.
T- Rex is ahead of its plan to have the complex fully leased within three years of buying it, he said.
About 500,000 square feet still is available in the “telecom fortress,” as Preminger calls it. T-Rex is negotiating with several telecom companies that could take all the space, Mulroy said.
Bell South is among the companies looking at the space, Spokesman Spero Canton said the company needs about 10,000 square feet in southern Palm Beach for an Internet hub.
The site will be for fiber-optic equipment that will make Internet use faster and more reliable. A decision on the site is expected within the month, Canton said.
Start-up Internet companies probably shouldn’t shop for space at T-Rex.
“Nobody dot-coms’ are not our customer,” Mulroy said.
T-Rex also isn’t interested in developing the land it still owns around the complex. About 93 acres along Yamato Road are zoned for 1.4 million square feet of space.
One site is 58-acres, the other is 35-acres.
Preminger said he has two offers from land development companies that want to buy both sites. Contracts could be signed in 30 to 60 days, he said.