COMMERCIAL CORNER
Jay Biggins Executive Managing Director Biggins Lacy Shapiro & Co. As executive managing director of BLS & Co., one of the largest specialty site selection and incentives advisory consulting firms in North America, Biggins manages the firm’s national corporate relationships, including advising clients on overall site selection, relocation and incentives strategies, managing major projects involving complex multi-jurisdictional competitive strategies and offering expert advice on incentives structures to facilitate client objectives. He also serves as an advisor to public sector economic development organizations. Prior to founding BLS & Co., Biggins served as senior vice president and CFO of the real estate subsidiary of the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corp., a diversified developer concentrating on corporate build-to-suit projects and large-scale urban projects undertaken in public-private partnerships. He also served as executive director of NYC's Office of Economic Development, and later was appointed Commissioner of Ports, International Trade & Commerce. How long have you been in the business? It’s been 25 years since founding BLS & Co., but my prior texperience —four years working on New York City’s economic development initiatives under the Koch Administration and seven years working on public/private partnerships with DKM Properties — was both the inspiration and preparation for what we do at BLS. What got you into the business? An attraction to the inherently interdisciplinary nature and the essential priority of economic development as a key ingredient in the success of virtually all public
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policy concerns and objectives. Who inspires you? My team, every day, and leaders in public service, business and NGOs who focus on the interconnectedness of their missions. How is the volatile tariff situation affecting corporate real estate decisions? Uncertainty is the core concern. Shaking up the status quo may have been warranted to long-entrenched dynamics ... but the simple reality is that long-term predictability is essential to induce long-term investments. Decisions to establish or relocate manufacturing capacity take years to plan and execute — three to four years for most large production operations, and four to six years for those requiring extended regulatory approval (e.g., FDA). That said, there is a growing list of other, more durable reasons to increase investment in U.S. production capacity, including narrowing labor cost arbitrage (due to increasing cost in alternative markets and automation), enhanced quality control and nimbler, more sustainable supply chains. And, yes, also a longer-term trend toward more protective trade policies that transcend administrations. What can companies do? Our perspective is focused on manufacturing and data center projects for which the availability of critical heavy equipment, including turbines and other energy-related components, are consequential in planning
new projects, especially those with time-tomarket urgency. Those with the balance sheet, liquidity and volume to command priority are distinguishing themselves. How are companies reassessing their real estate? We can expect the migration back toward three to four or more days at the office (perhaps downtown or satellite) to continue, but there will have been some degree of longterm shift in the balance of work from home and return to work (RTW) relative to the preCOVID-19 norm. The shift in employee office occupancy may only be a couple of percentage points, which is profound in terms of total local consumer demand, transit ridership and many other metrics, and its impacts will be felt. Yet it’s still just a few points, so in some ways not always noticeable in all contexts. An affordable downtown is the key balancer. All of our clients are smartly not over-playing the sluggish and uneven RTW transition and remain highly focused on the local workforce access as they continue to press for increased presence at the office — here too a balance of accommodating and enjoying the benefits of flexibility and some cost savings, but focusing on where most employees and most high-value employees, come together to collaborate, mentor, socialize and excel. What keeps you up at night? A level of national and global instability accelerated both by breakdown of trust in institutions and in the provenance of “facts.”
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