Bucking the high-vacancy trend for class B commercial space in Stamford (recently cited at 30%), Garden Homes boasts that it is keeping office vacancy down to between only 2% to 3%.

They accomplish this by making it more cost effective and convenient for tenants to rent from them and then leverage the spread between what tenants would ordinarily pay for ancillary services and what the landlord can get the same services by rolling individual users up to bulk quantities.

For instance, Garden Homes Management started by providing office space tenants with free internet access, saving them not only the recurring monthly costs, but installation costs, repair costs and the pain associated with maintenance.

Most recently, the company decided to boost the value of tenant benefits even further to $6.65 per square foot in measurable annual savings, bringing the cost for class B office space to the equivalent of industrial class C somewhere else. What does it cost for Garden Homes Management to do this? Around half a buck a square foot. It's a pure arbitrage play that not only creates long term tenant loyalty and stability, but results in improved property values.

This latest program addition gives tenants free telephones, free telephone lines, free voice mail and auto attendant, free local calls and long distance rates so low that they were previously reserved for large volume corporate users.

The program was created by Office Technology Consulting Inc, a 21 year old Stamford firm (www.phoneguru.com).

The system designer, Stan Rosenzweig, first studied Garden Homes's business, then recommended total replacement of the existing telephone equipment with new VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) from Mitel Networks Corporation. Rosenzweig was able to show Garden Homes how to improve its own business and extend the new service to all its tenants at a recurring cost of less than 20% more than it was paying for its own corporate service. Also, the tenant portion turned out to be 90% less than what the tenants were paying on their own.

Among the many whiz-bang features the new VoIP system provides, one actually is able to add more rentable square feet to existing properties, virtually. Here's how this works. Users (tenants), can, if they choose, take their phones home and plug them into any internet connection and be instantly connected to their offices as if they were still there.

They can take their phones to Florida, or London and do the same. The phones and voicemail, via internet, still act as if they were in Stamford. So, since corporate identity works from anywhere there is an internet connection, small firms who add work-at-home staff, or temporary staff, or traveling staff, can enjoy virtual office space at home or at Starbucks.

In other words, tenants can have more people on payroll than their physical space allows for, creating virtual space both for tenant and landlord. While services for physical tenants are included in the rent, equipment and services for these additional employees can result in additional rents.

"I've been trying to figure out for years how to provide this value proposition to tenants… It's the Holy Grail." Says Garden Homes's Vice President Richard Freedman. "Adding value to property, stabilizes the rent roll by driving vacancy rate down and increasing the value of each property."