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Last Words
When All That's Left Is a Name
By Joanna Glasner, Wired News
24/02/2003
SAN FRANCISCO -- Putting a corporate logo on top of a big building is supposed be a way for companies to tout their success to the world.
But for many technology and telecommunications companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, prominent nameplates are turning out to be beacons of brand-name obsolescence.
From the downtown San Francisco skyscraper named for AirTouch, a wireless provider acquired four years ago by Vodafone Group, to the ballpark bearing the name of Pacific Bell, the local phone company now owned by SBC Communications, some of the region's most visible structures boast corporate names that are no longer in active use.
In the sprawling suburban office parks of Silicon Valley, scattered buildings still maintain signs bearing the names of companies that long ago shut down. Faded corporate mastheads offer a spot of color in a commercial real estate landscape populated with empty parking lots and "for lease" signs.
"It's definitely a market that's void of trophy tenants,' said Dan Mihalovich, founder of Mihalovich Partners, which finds office space for tenants in the San Francisco area. Landlords who benefited from feverish demand for office space in the late 1990s are now finding vacant buildings nearly impossible to refill.
In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, landlords have managed to clean up signage of some of Silicon Valley's most high profile burnouts, like online grocer Webvan and high-speed Internet provider ExciteAtHome.
But with few new tenants moving in, and a number of existing tenants in the process of changing names, outdated signs continue to reign above city skylines and office parks.
Looming 31 stories above San Francisco's financial district, perhaps the most blatant example of outdated nomenclature belongs to the wireless provider formerly known as AirTouch. Although AirTouch has been part of Vodafone since 1999, it no longer occupies its former headquarters building and doesn't offer service under its own brand. Still, its logo remains where it was first put seven years ago.
Jerry Igra, vice president at broker Grubb & Ellis, which is handling subleasing of the former AirTouch headquarters, said the building's owner would be willing to change the name atop the building for a new tenant.
"They would certainly be interested in changing the sign, provided the tenant takes enough space in the property to justify it," said Igra, who sees the naming opportunity as a draw for new tenants, as San Francisco only permits lettering on top of a few buildings, and not on new structures.
But until a sufficiently deep-pocketed tenant comes along, the AirTouch logo remains.
A couple of miles south, SBC is in a similar pickle. The Texas company acquired the old local phone company, Pacific Bell, in 1997. At the time, Pacific Bell had just agreed to pay a reported $50 million for the right to name San Francisco's new baseball stadium Pac Bell Park.
Trouble is, SBC no longer plans to use the Pacific Bell brand name. The company is currently negotiating with the San Francisco Giants to have the stadium name renamed for SBC. Although the Giants don't believe such a change is feasible for this baseball season, the phone company expects the change to be in place for 2004.
John Britton, SBC's spokseman, said the phone company has not yet decided what the new name will be.
But the ballpark isn't the only naming issue SBC inherited following an acquisition binge in the late-1990s. The company only recently removed the name Pacific Telesis, another brand it is phasing out, from a landmark downtown building. Across the West Coast, the company is removing vestiges of the Pacific Bell name from buildings.
"It's very time consuming for us to go and change everything," Britton said. "We're going about it as quickly as we can." Although skyscraper peaks offer the most eye-catching showcases for corporate logos, Colin Yasokochi, research director at Grubb & Ellis, says naming deals are far more common for low-rise office buildings. This is largely because landlords are more likely to lease such buildings to a single tenant.
But since so many technology companies in the greater Silicon Valley area have closed or sold their assets over the last three years, signs can be deceiving. Igra cites the example of the building he passes in his commute, which bears the name of Asera, a software developer whose assets were recently purchased by SEEC, a company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In San Francisco's "Multimedia Gulch," a neighborhood that once housed scores of dot-com startups, the building-top sign of Web design firm Organic offers a dated reminder of a bygone era. Although Organic is still around, it no longer occupies the building.
Out of place as such signs may be, however, Mihalovich says they're far outnumbered by buildings from which the names of failed tenants have been hastily removed. The old signs may be colorful, but they're not much of an image-booster for building owners.
"As a landlord, if I made a commitment to give a tenant a full building, and the company has folded, in effect, I'm advertising on a daily basis an enormous hole that I have in my building and the lack of performance of my asset," he said.
Read the full article with pictures at Wired News
Links:
Bankrupt One.Tel sign in Sydney Australia
One.Tel signage article
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