St. Paul's BOMA unveils new DataSource website, expanding its perspective

St. Paul's membership organization for commercial real estate is going paperless.

The Greater Saint Paul Building Owners and Managers Association, commonly called BOMA, launched a new website called DataSource Monday that replaces the printed version of its 20-year-old annual market report.

The 300-member organization unveiled the new website during a luncheon with civic and real estate leaders at the St. Paul Hotel. Perhaps more importantly, the shift from paper to digital signals a change in perspective for leaders in St. Paul's downtown.

"This really is to help support the new initiative found in the Downtown Saint Paul Alliance (SPda), a public-private partnership. Their goal is to drive growth downtown and we want to be able to measure that success. So, yes, growing the office market is one way we can mark that, but we want to start tracking and reporting many more metrics," said BOMA president Joe Spartz.

The downtown alliance is an offshoot of BOMA that officially formed in Dec. 2013. The group's vision is also an expansion of BOMA's traditionally more commercial-centric perspective.

"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.

_{Source: St. Paul BOMA/DataSource}

And so BOMA, in conjunction with SPda, are now formally recognizing the interconnection between the residential, retail and commercial with its new website.

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

This is the organization's latest iteration in its evolution. It has long grappled with how to more fully represent the commercial market of its central business district.

"Many of the real estate companies that have excellent reporting were really only reporting on the competitive (office) space," said Patricia Wolf, a member of BOMA." And so we looked at it and, given that we are the capital city, we realized that we were really underestimating what was happening in our market."

Being the capital seat, St. Paul's indicators were often skewed when a government entity would vacate a commercial building downtown because it was building its own facilities.

Which is why BOMA's market report breaks down its vacancies by competitive, government and owner-occupied.