Mike Amato of New Life Marketing calls it the room where he puts his game face on. The roughly 10-foot-by-12-foot space in Cranston contains all the typical trimmings for an office, including a desk, a bookshelf, a phone, a floor plant and a chair for a customer. Down the hall he has a copier, a waiting room, a conference room and may soon have a receptionist.
It all sounds typical until Amato, who runs an Internet marketing company, explains that he shares the copier, conference room and lobby with 13 other businesses. The planned receptionist would work for all them. And Amato operates under a month-to-month lease that includes everything from heat to Internet.
It’s all part of a concept known as a “co-work site,” where a group of small, often one-person outfits band together to share costs and expertise and, hopefully, keep overhead low.
It has been tried in other parts of the country. Now Benjamin Viti, an energetic 24-year-old, thinks he can use the concept to turn around his family’s real estate businesses and provide incubator space for Rhode Island companies.
Viti said his family experienced remarkably bad timing when it decided to go on a “buck wild,” building-purchasing spree between 2004 and 2007, during the very height of the real estate market. Viti says it was too easy. He ended up with 10 buildings and more than 100,000 square feet of space. Then the economy crashed.
Coldwell Banker informed the family it planned to leave 7,500 square feet of space in the family’s Oaklawn Avenue office building in Cranston by September 2009. Viti thought he caught a break when a mortgage company snapped up the lease the next day, but the company folded five months later. What stayed was the mortgage on the building Viti purchased for $1.4 million in January 2007. Viti and his father, also Benjamin, huddled to form a game plan.
“We were like, ‘Oh my God,’ we have a big mortgage to pay every month and we don’t know how,” the younger Viti said.
His father suggested trying a concept he saw in California called a co-work site. Landlords unable to find tenants with huge space needs turned to tiny companies looking for a business address and a place to meet customers. Such companies, usually professionals, also could not afford to pay for vast lobbies or conference rooms they may use just a handful of times a month. Why not, the elder Viti said, try a co-work site in Rhode Island?
In a bad economy, “This is a great way for small businesses not to just survive, but thrive,” Pagnozzi said.
Viti said he has already found tenants for eight of the 14 offices in the shared suite and plans another shared suite downstairs.
To market the property, Viti has followed anything but a traditional path. Inspired by the social-networking Web site Facebook and poor results from real estate companies, Viti fired the agents and listed the offices on Craigslist. Amato, the Internet-marketing professional, saw the listing and decided the $400 monthly rent – with includes utilities, Internet access and free parking – beat working out of his house. And a month-to-month lease meant no penalties if the company’s revenue took a dive and he was forced to move out.
“I’ve been a lot more productive here,” said Amato, who owns New Life Marketing.
Viti also wants to tap into professionals who want a place to work away from home, but are not ready for a permanent office.
But for now he is focused on the shared office-suite concept. He has toiled late into the evening doing the necessary construction work himself and he has played salesman, negotiator and marketing director. And if the concept works, Viti wants to expand it to his other buildings. And he wants businesses that received their start in the spaces to remember him and his other locations when they are looking for bigger offices.
“There’s a lot of opportunity if you do things the right way,” Viti said. •
