Shopping for Office Space? Skip Buildings with a Managed Riser Company!
Hi. I'm Max Clark. I'm the founder and CEO of IT broker dot com. I'm gonna tell you a little secret here. It's gonna save you days weeks of aggravation and expense and frustration and things along those lines.
Speaker 1:If you're currently shopping for office space, it's going to sound really weird because we're supposed to be in a remote only world at this point. But companies still have offices. They still have office space, and they still need to put people in office space so let's just not get in the whole work from home return to office argument and just say it does happen okay so when you're out shopping for office space and you're looking at different buildings ask the property manager ask the leasing broker if the building is using a managed riser company do they have a managed riser company that's servicing the building and if they do skip the building don't sign a lease with them move on and find one that doesn't look in the building. You have the minimum point of entry. This is usually a closet in the basement.
Speaker 1:This is where all the telco services come into and then are distributed up. And then so from that info, if it's a great building directly in line with the building just going up and down you have telecom closets on each floor and then there's a conduit that connect each floor and that's the riser so if you look at an older building let's say a vintage you know 60 70s 80s building you know there's a lot of cable in these risers there's a lot of stuff installed on the walls and it's just gonna show the history and the lineage of the building and what was there and people moving in people moving out and it's just it turns into a mess so riser companies and managed riser came about to solve a problem and that problem was how do you identify tag and decommission dead cable and not have a complete rat's nest on your hands so they came from a good place but you know this is one of those things where good intentions the road to hell is paved with good intentions and now these riser companies have completely just gone off the rails and the process that we explain to our clients when they've trying to get internet network service delivered at a riser you know in a managed riser building it kind of goes like this the order is submitted to the carrier so you sign the contract order submitted the carrier carrier goes out and tries to do the work carrier finds out they can't do the work hopefully the carrier already has an ROE a right of entry or equipment in the building let's just assume that they do carry then finds out that they're not allowed to do work in the building property management will tell the carrier that deal with the riser company.
Speaker 1:Maybe they already deal with that riser company because the riser companies in a lot of different buildings. By the way, there's big riser operations at this point that become very large entities and maybe the company already has a relationship or has a contact with that riser company and vice versa. The riser company is then going to get that work order and is going to evaluate what it's gonna take to run that cable. By the way, the fastest I've seen this process go is 2 weeks. So they're gonna figure out what they need to do to run this cable, and then they're gonna do the next thing, which is they're gonna tell the carrier this is what it's gonna take, a k a how much you have to pay us to run this cable.
Speaker 1:And then we enter into this weird kind of, too squishy phase between the riser company and the carrier. You know, let's just call a spade a spade. Really, what it is is the riser company trying to figure out how much money they can extract the carrier in order to get this cable run. Right? So, you know, an opening bid is gonna be submitted.
Speaker 1:The carrier is gonna say no, then they're gonna come back and revise. And it's gonna go back and forth a few days, and you're not gonna have any insight to what's actually happening here because neither parties are allowed to tell you what's going on and then hopefully they come to a truce and then they make an agreement and then the carrier agrees to pay the riser company what they want or what they agree to and then the riser company schedules the work you know the best case scenario it's 2 to 3 weeks the worst case scenario is a lot longer than that and it's added expense I've seen situations where the riser companies want so much money from the carrier the carrier has to pass that cost back to the client and you know whoops by the way you know here's what you thought you were gonna pay but you have to pay this other thing instead because we have to cover our costs. It's unfortunate because you're creating the situation with a non competitive monopoly that has complete unilateral control with no recourse. There's no recourse. It just creates pain and aggravation frustration.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's crazy about these things that we've seen some buildings that are starting to look at cross connects. So the actual cable that's running between the MPO and the suite has additional revenue sources. Now I don't know if this is coming from the building ownership or if this is going property management, and who's collecting these fees and where it's going? But I've seen situations where a client has signed with a preferred carrier. Carrier wasn't in the building.
Speaker 1:Carriers in the conduit in front of the building. It's a relatively inexpensive build for the carrier to bring fiber into the building. And then they find out the building wants $5,000, $10,000 for the right to come into the building to do the work and then they want an additional 5 $6,000 a year for them to have their equipment in the info in order to service the building now let me let you in on a secret who's paying that money it's not the carrier it's gonna be you if you're the that situation way we've dealt with this and the way we counsel our clients to deal with us is to include here's the big keyword when you're doing leasing negotiations before you sign the lease you are at a point of I don't want to say maximum leverage leverage is a probably negative term here in this one, but you're at maximum friendliness where you can get the most concessions and interest out of it because the people that are actually driving that leasing process stand to make a lot of money, a lot of money on your lease. You know, if you're leasing 10,000 feet at $10 a square foot on 5 years, that leasing broker is gonna make tens of 1,000 of dollars off of you.
Speaker 1:Right? So what are they gonna do? They're gonna make sure that everything they can get you in order to get you assigned that paperwork for them to paid is gonna happen. So we have a full list that we give our clients of ask for these things and no surprise here. Are we, info, riser?
Speaker 1:Those are all included on the list of things that you should ask for because if you ask for them upfront, we've yet to see a situation where it wasn't given and it makes everything so much better anyways. So back to the the beginning of this rant. If you can avoid signing a lease with a building that has a managed riser company involved with the building, save yourself so much aggravation and just skip the building. Just skip it. You know, there's other buildings out there that are gonna be much easier for you to work with because, you know, if you're involved with IT or telecom, you understand this.
Speaker 1:It's you get you had a request to something along the lines of, hey. We signed this lease. We're moving in next week. We need Internet. Good luck.
Speaker 1:You're not getting it. Why aren't we getting it? Oh, because we have to wait for this weird third party that nobody knew was involved to do whatever they wanna do in order to get paid, however much they wanna get paid in order for their time. You know? Like, what does it do for your timeline?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We were gonna install next week. We started paying rent next week but you know it's gonna take us 2 3 4 5 6 weeks to get service turned on and the real thing that's really annoying about this is the people that are getting yelled at are the ones that weren't involved in selecting the building didn't know there was a riser company in place in the first place have no control over either those things but yet why is the internet where there why can't we install so don't yell at your IT team if they can't get circuits provision because you signed a lease at a building that has a riser company and it's completely out of their control anyways I'm Max Clark. Save yourself some aggravation. Do not sign a lease for the building with a riser company.
Speaker 1:If you've got any horror stories about this, I'd love to hear yours. I've experienced some amazing ones, but, you know, it actually I think it would make my day. Comment below. Tell me your versions. Love to read them.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon
