St. Paul developers promote more data for changing city

St. Paul's commercial real estate organization is going paperless and, in the process, taking a new approach to growth.

The Greater St. Paul Building Owners and Managers Association, or BOMA, on Monday launched a new website called DataSource that replaces the printed version of its annual market report, which it has printed since 1994.

Along with the shift from paper to digital, the association is taking a broader approach to the collection and reporting of data, a change in perspective that mainly reflects the return of residents in the downtown core. The goal is to open more commercial opportunity by giving developers and outside investors more information about the city's changing dynamics.

"This really is to help support the new initiative found in the St. Paul Downtown Alliance. Their goal is to drive growth downtown and we want to be able to measure that success," BOMA president Joe Spartz said. "Growing the office market is one way we can mark that, but we want to start tracking and reporting many more metrics."

The downtown alliance officially formed in December 2013 as an offshoot of BOMA, but with an expanded vision.

"What we feel we have here are really more data points that show a more complex and in-depth picture of what is happening in the downtown St. Paul market, and that is what DataSource is really going to be about," Spartz said.

From 2010 to 2014, downtown St. Paul experienced a 62 percent jump in its residential population.

BOMA, in conjunction with the downtown alliance, is now formally recognizing the interplay between the residential, retail and commercial with its new website, which the 300-member organization publicly unveiled during a luncheon with civic and real estate leaders at the St. Paul Hotel.

"Everything is following residential. That's really the driver for retail, which leads to more demand for commercial office space," Spartz said.

Grocers are usually at the forefront of retail revitalization, he said, and the new Lunds store at the Penfield apartments is an indication of that in downtown St. Paul.

Spartz anticipates a few years' lag time between the residential boom and its impact on the downtown office market.

Wilhelm, who has leased properties in both cities' central business district for 15 years, says taking a more holistic approach to development and then marketing it that way "would help break down a lot of perceptions that St. Paul is a sleepy little provincial town all based on government and insurance. There is a lot more to it than that."

As for this year's hard numbers, St. Paul's central business district remained relatively flat with 10 percent vacancy overall. Under the multiple-tenant or competitive classification, the vacancy rate rose slightly to 20.5 percent this year from 19.5 percent in 2013.