Remotely One - A remote work podcast
Remotely One - A remote work podcast
Rethinking Office Space: The Rise of Remote Work and the Need for Flexible, Decentralized Hubs with Francis Saele - ep. 104
New week, new episode! This time, Rick and Kaleem sit down with Francis Saele, a thought leader in workplace real estate and technology and Managing Principal at Mortevita, for an in-depth conversation about the evolving role of office spaces, especially in the context of remote and hybrid work, and the broader shifts occurring in the commercial real estate sector.
Francis takes us through his professional journey, including building a startup in the commercial real estate industry that was later acquired by CBRE. His expertise in real estate has shaped his views on workplace transformation, particularly with the rise of remote and hybrid work. According to Francis, the role of the office has fundamentally shifted in recent years—and it certainly has!
The shift toward distributed work is undeniable. Many organizations have adopted hybrid models, enabling employees to work remotely part-time. As a result, businesses no longer need as much office space, and many workers can perform tasks remotely, eliminating the need for daily office commutes.
Landlords, however, are facing significant challenges as the demand for traditional office space declines. At the same time, companies are struggling to optimize their office use. The future of office spaces may not lie in legacy downtown buildings but in decentralized hubs located closer to where employees live. This concept, known as "central living districts," integrates office spaces into communities, making them more accessible and convenient for workers.
With reduced demand for traditional office spaces, repurposing older buildings for alternative uses is becoming an intriguing possibility. Potential options range from residential spaces to niche industries like vertical farming, though conversion processes can be complex. Cities are increasingly focusing on transforming downtown areas with walkability, green spaces, and mixed-use developments—ideas that could reshape the future of office real estate.
As the landscape of office spaces continues to evolve with the rise of remote work and a growing emphasis on employee-centric environments, we dive into the potential for repurposing office buildings and the role of technology in reshaping the future of work. Grab your coffee and notebook, and join us as Francis Saele takes us through these exciting changes and shares the mission behind Mortevita—an integrator specializing in consulting for the new knowledge workplace, corporate real estate, and emerging workplace technologies. Thank you for joining us, Francis!
Learn more about Francis:
- Francis’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fran-saele/
More about us:
- Remotely One’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/remotelyone
- Remotely One’s Webpage: https://www.remotelyone.com/
Hi guys,
Kaleem:How are you doing, man?
Francis:I'm doing great. By the way, I have a headset that I can switch to, but I frequently do these podcasts with just the Yeti mic and,
Rick:As long as there's no echo on our end, you should be good.
Francis:Do you hear anything?
Kaleem:No, I don't hear anything. I think you sound great.
Francis:Yeah. Okay. Well, don't, don't get over, you know, overwhelmed. It's early in this project.
Rick:We are known for not getting
Kaleem:don't get overwhelmed by my beauty. I get you. I get
Francis:Well, no, no, you are. I'll tell you, you've got the best smile on LinkedIn.
Kaleem:Oh, here we go. Here we go,
Francis:how does he do that? You know, cause I mean, we sort of have the same thing that it, mine doesn't come through. I don't know why it must be older teeth.
Kaleem:You're going to make me put that slow music on. We're going to
Francis:good. That's
Kaleem:baby. We're going to slow dance.
Rick:Welcome back everybody to remotely one I am your co host, Rick Haney, joined by my esteemed colleague, Kaleem Clarkson. What's shakin brother? Look at you all dancing over
Kaleem:Oh, pointing to myself. I'm feeling good, baby. How you doing, baby? You looking
Rick:I'm pumped up. I'm pumped up. We've been laughing so much already on this show. Today's gonna be, it's what we like to call, folks, a real doozy.
Kaleem:doozy. A
Rick:A wicked doozy, as they say up north. Yeah,
Kaleem:percent dude.
Rick:yeah, yeah. So hey everybody, since you know us, you know how to find us now, do us a huge favor and go to ratethispodcast. com forward slash remotely one and just leave us a review. That's all we ask. Not a big deal. Not a huge time commitment. If you could do that for us, we would be ever so grateful. Since Since 2015, Remotely One Is one of the largest communities of remote work professionals, with over 3, 500 Slack members and 5, 000 email subscribers. Really? Man, we are going places. We are going places. It is free to join. Go check it out at remotelyone. com. And with that out of the way, Kaleem, my brother from another mother. Give us a tease or two about today's guest.
Kaleem:sweet Mickey Mickey. Let me tell you about our guest today, man. Let me tell you about our guest today. Our guests, they are originally from Buffalo, New York. So they know about that snow, son.
Rick:Oh, don't we all, don't we
Kaleem:yes we do, but they currently reside in Cincinnati, Ohio. Let's see what else, what else we got here for our guests. Our guests today, they hold an MBA in finance and a BS in psychology. So they're up in their mind. They could tell you how you're feeling, but they
Rick:lot of thinking going on.
Kaleem:numbers. They can also crunch numbers. Um, let's see. Oh, our guests, they are a corporate real estate, commercial real estate professional. They built a startup earlier in their career that was acquired by CBRE. Just a little real estate company, CBRE, just a tiny
Rick:I May have heard of
Kaleem:company. Let's see. They've held various leadership roles at different real estate companies, such as Newmark group, another company, it's tiny, a consultant company called. No big deal. No big deal. No big deal. Rick, what are we doing? Is the question. What are we
Rick:Uh, n not enough.
Kaleem:not enough. Let's see. What else about I guess? There's just so much good shit about I guess. Oh, something, some things most people don't know about I guess. They once sunk, almost sunk, a 450 foot long lake freighter. Are you kidding me? And that shit moved cement, Rick. It was a cement lake freighter that, they've almost sunk!
Rick:that ain't coming back up if you let it go.
Kaleem:It's down. It's down.
Rick:not coming back up for breakfast.
Kaleem:Yup. And, and Rick, Rick, this is just, we definitely gotta learn more about this. Something A lot of people don't know about, I guess something else is that our guests, you know, they had to save money for college, Rick, they had to pay for college and they spent a summer as a hooker, Rick, a hooker.
Rick:Okay little unorthodox, but we'll get to
Kaleem:we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Let's see our guests today. They are a thought leader. In the emerging world of distributing work. That's what we connected. Transformation of work in the workplace. And he's just always published in all of these different places and how corporate, real estate and the office kind of build that environment. Right. Our guest today now serves as the managing principal of Morta Vita, an integrator of workplace, real estate, and technology that services commercial clients,
Rick:Okay.
Kaleem:listeners and viewers, please give a warm welcome to Francis. Let
Francis:Kaleem, Kaleem, did you go to the old school of introductions or what? I like that. I
Kaleem:me calm down, calm down studio on it. Shut up.
Rick:hey studio audience we got a job to do here people
Kaleem:Thank you, Francis, Fran.
Francis:Kaleem, I havee to tell you, I checked and I have my mouse in my pocket. So when you referred to me as we, and they, and all my pronouns are right. So
Kaleem:Yes. Yes. Well, we can't give away. We can't give away who our guest is. You know what I
Rick:Oh, the edification is like the whole point The whole thing here, right? We want to make sure you are pumped up and
Kaleem:but really appreciate you, man. I, you know, I connecting with you on LinkedIn. I feel like I've known you for 20 years. You post a lot of great. Content, man. And I. just appreciate you joining us on the show, man. Oh,
Rick:as do I.
Francis:Yeah. Well, thank you both. Great to be here. And I, and I've always enjoyed this show. I think it's kind of a fun place to go when you need to improve your attitude, you want to get up, you tune in here.
Rick:Oh,
Kaleem:you baby.
Rick:much.
Kaleem:what we're trying to do.
Rick:That was the bolster of
Kaleem:remote work. And if you need to lighten up your day, you start this show. If you're sitting there working remotely or hybrid or wherever, you can start your day off with a couple of dudes from Maine.
Rick:yeah. Eat that Kathy Lee and Hoda. We're coming for y'all. And most importantly, I gotta know. I gotta know. What was it like being a hooker?
Francis:Oh, you want to start with the hooker? Well, uh, you know, I know that sounds bad, but, but there is hope for hookers and actually hookers, hookers are doing pretty well, even, even in the old days when, when I had to do this. But, actually this was not the hooker that everybody's thinking about, unfortunately. And I have the job and somewhere I can bring it out. But, uh, this was a summer job that I was able to get at Republic steel, just South of Buffalo, New York. And he used to take a bus every day down there to go to the end was a midnight shift. We worked 6 days a week, midnight to 8. And it was a, it was actually a bar mill. They created bars of steel and then they take the bars and they wrap them up. And they would put them in a storage area until they were shipped. Okay, and how did the steel get from the storage bins, which were huge, loaded with different kinds of steel and different customers. They're all sold waiting to be shipped.
Kaleem:Okay.
Francis:send out a technician who had one assistant. So there were, you know, about five or six teams like this. And we went out and these, you know, steel barns, we found the steel usually wasn't where it was supposed to be. You had to find it. And then you had to lift the steel up. Those were overhead cranes, right? And the primary guy would put the first side on and they would lift it up. So this is, you know, Tons of steel hanging up like this with other things right around it. And then my job was to reach underneath this, the, this bundle of bars with a long hook and hook the chain and then hook the chain on the time this side, and then
Kaleem:hook!
Francis:it's, it is the hook. That's right.
Kaleem:So you were called the hooker because you had to hook the steel!
Francis:That that's exactly right.
Kaleem:Oh, there it is, baby.
Rick:Well, don't I feel like a horse's patoot?
Francis:I've been to union. I had all the union protections, you know, with all that stuff. But I'll tell you a couple of times, more than once, I'd say four or five times, the guy put the bar up, bars up, and I would go in there with my hook. And all of a sudden something slipped off and, you know, boom. So if you were too far under the bars, you could lose a lot.
Kaleem:Mm. Mm.
Francis:was a great job. And yeah.
Kaleem:job!
Francis:No, I mean, you
Kaleem:Not
Rick:cost me an arm and a leg, but it was a great job.
Francis:that there's a lot of relaxation on the midnight shift. We started at maybe 1230 that did one or two loads. And we came back, it was time for lunch, you know, so you went, what do you eat at four in the morning? and then you would go back and maybe do one other load then wait for the sun to come up. So it wasn't really that intense, but when you got out there, you had to really be awake,
Kaleem:Yes, you did. You sure did. So take that, Richard Gere, okay? Take that, Julia Roberts.
Rick:you're not the heroes you think
Kaleem:you're not saving our guest today, Richard Gere, okay? He was lifting steel, son.
Rick:all that aside. Thank you for sporting our juvenile sense of humor.
Kaleem:mean, everyone was thinking it. Everyone was thinking it. So we had to get it out of the way.
Rick:Of course, of course, of course, you know, we know that was a long time ago and you've had a host of professional experiences since then, and, uh, obviously these times we're in, everybody knows the pandemic changed the entire work landscape, but more specifically the emergence of distributed work has had a dramatic effect on physical office space. Can you talk to us about some of those challenges and how they're being addressed?
Francis:Well, that's a great question actually. And you know, when people talk about workplace, maybe just get into it with this comment. The workplace, when you thought about workplace before 2020, And this was a fun corporate services function that everybody in real estate knew about. Basically, what workplace management was decide how big a space you needed for whatever the team was. And as that lease came up for renewal, they would figure out maybe how many more people they expect to add over the next three, five years, add that all up and then say, okay, instead of 80 people, we need a space for 120 people go out and find a space. And you go out and find a space and you'd lay it out and that's it. That's it. That was all workplace was. Okay. Workplaces become much, much more complicated and that's not, although that function still exists. It's a very late decision as to where you go exactly in terms of an office environment. But to your question, I think clearly the office has changed quite a bit in terms of what it does. And frankly, I think there is no single answer yet. I don't think there's no definitive answer and there may never be, you know, the office is designed to do this. My sense is that for different organizations, the office does different things. But other things are gone elsewhere. They've gone into the distributed environment. They've gone to homes, they've gone to third places. They've gone to other, you know, coworking places. It's a really, an evolution that is extraordinary and I'm looking forward to somebody writing a really good book about this. I'm sure there'll be several. Okay. But to your question, what happens to the real estate that exists? This is a kind of a problem for certainly it's a problem for most landlords, but it's also a problem for the occupiers whose people are now not there all that much. You know, most organizations are operating on some type of hybrid schedule, or they may be in the office two, two and a half, three days a week, maybe, maybe not. Some of that's enforced, some of it isn't. So you don't really need as much space as you. As you had before, that's one thing. The second thing is that when you are asked to come into an office, what do you do there? You know, I mean, you see a lot of complaints about people who spend an hour and a half taking a train into an office to sit there on a zoom call that they could have done, you know, from their next, next room in their home. So, there are all kinds of things like that going on which suggests that the role of the office and where the office is. Okay. Or should be, are changing and I think that's a couple of the big things that are happening in my mind, but about legacy office real estate is that historically most of it was centered in a downtown area. Yes, there was suburban nodes, but still, you know, the biggest node was downtown and the downtown area while central in the community is likely to be the farthest away from most people who. Tend to live remotely. So over time, my sense is that as the office requirement, whatever that is grows. It's probably not going to grow where the existing legacy stock of office exists. Now, I think we'll see office emerging in places that are more certainly closer to where employees are. It's the Adam Newman concept of flow where, you know, you would have. Where you go to, to collaborate with people in person, fairly close to where you live and where you shop and where you go to the show or whatever. So these nodes are going to emerge. I'd like to call them central living districts. The central business district is, is really up in the air in terms of what's going to happen there. I mean, there's a sense of what people moving into conversions of office to residential, other, um, uses, but those are very difficult to pull off. And they're expensive and. And we've seen some of that, but it's not going to be an opportunity for everybody.
Kaleem:Fran, let me ask you. So you start your career. I'm just kind of curious.
Francis:Okay. I
Kaleem:you know,
Francis:do
Kaleem:transition your career. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, you kind of start off your career and You build a great startup and it gets acquired by CBRE and you start working for them. And you're finding spaces kind of like what you explain for companies, right? And you're doing that, but then all of a sudden pandemic happens. And probably even a little bit before the pandemic, you were probably starting to see a little bit of a shift towards some flexibility from even a, you know, some of the tech sector and some other sectors, but how did you as a Commercial real estate professional, how did you embrace this idea of remote work and workplace flexibility when it's obviously impacting your career and your pocket specifically, like, like how, and why do you feel this need or this desire to talk about workplace flexibility as a person who manages these spaces?
Francis:that's an interesting question. I will tell you at the time this happened. I was working in Dallas and lived in Dallas for 2, 3 years. We had a team in Dallas, a US team in Dallas and a team in Pittsburgh. But then about half of the people we work with were overseas. We outsourced a great deal of processing work to the Philippines and, India. And what happened, it was an interesting evolution of thinking because. Uh, when I started the job, everybody came to the office all the time, but if you live in Dallas, I don't know how familiar you are with Dallas traffic. But we had a lot of people that were driving an hour, hour and a half, some even more than that each way every morning, on the highways in and around where we were, which was on the Dallas North freeway. If you know the city. And the first event that happened actually, I think the one or two people who came to, they came in and said, we have a problem. We like working here and everything, but you're our competitor had offered to let them do the same job from home because they could do all the work from home on a computer.
Kaleem:What year is This Fran roughly? Just
Francis:This is, let's see, 2017.
Kaleem:wow. So like before this is not
Francis:Oh, this is yeah. They're way before the pandemic.
Kaleem:wow. Okay.
Francis:And we said, well, you know, we would be okay with maybe you, you staying working from home one day a week. It's the same evolution. It just happened earlier one day a week or two days a week. So you're, there's a negotiation going on with individual employees and then the employees start talking amongst each other and say, Hey, who's this guy? And that, so then so we lost that person really good. And about a month later, another person came in and said the same thing. And I think it was a different competitor because there were a lot of competitors in Dallas. It's a big MSA.
Kaleem:so competition is offering. So just to clarify competition is offering remote and flexibility and people are leaving your company.
Francis:right. Because, you know, it's not traditional. I mean, you know, Newmark is a great company, by the way. This is a,
Kaleem:yeah,
Francis:uh, I don't want to talk too much about the company, but they're very traditional New York and, and they're, you know, really polished, professionals there. And so the mindset of the company is, well, you know, every place you go, it's suit and tie and everything, and you have to be together. And the idea of working remotely was foreign at the time, frankly. And actually for computers, they would buy desktops so you couldn't take them out. You had to come to the office and do your work, right? Okay. It's a corporate strategy at the time. And again, that's not a put down of the company, but we did have people on some notebooks and those are the people who became vulnerable because they could, you know, if you didn't need a, I mean, if you had a notebook, you could do it, but Why couldn't I do it? Because someone in New York said no. So, after the second person left, we decided, well, we know if we should experiment with this ourselves. And so we had a team that figured out a strategy because a lot of the work actually was being done. In the air, you know, in Asia, so it didn't really make any difference where you were when you had that communication with them. But anyway, so we decided basically that we would take, you know, most of the staff, including the management staff and allow them to work from home. So I remember when I left in 2020, cause I was in Dallas in March of 2020. If you remember the messages were coming out, get out. Cause there won't be any flights available after Friday. You know, it's one of those messages, by that time in the pandemic, We only had two or three people that would came in on a regular basis, one to open the mail, basically, and another one who lived fairly close. Everybody else was working from home. So we got through that and, but then we figured, tried to figure out new ways to operate with our people who weren't there all the time. We would have a monthly, get together, would be a lunch and learn, or it would be a, some type of meeting, or we would create teams to get together periodically. So we were able to stay in touch and we sort of had primordial, you know, distributed work ideas, which since have matured quite a bit. But, so when the pandemic hit, it was pretty easy. Everybody, by that time, everybody was in notebooks. Hey guys, everybody go home. And everybody said, fine. So, That's how I got it. I don't know if they answered your question. Probably spent too much time on that. But at that point, I figured out that what I have been doing for the last 20 years was interesting and important and everything. But the interesting part of real estate and workplace was just beginning and I wanted to be involved in that full time.
Speaker:We'll be right back after these words. 2020 was no joke. It changed the game for everyone. Workplace flexibility is no longer a perk, but an expectation. In fact, a recent study showed that a flexible schedule is more important than salary. Yeah, you heard that right? Employees want choices over cash. If you're a startup or a small business that doesn't have a remote work strategy, stop what you're doing right now and complete our free tree assessment at blendmeinc. com. Since 2013, BlendMe Inc. Has been helping small businesses improve the remote employee experience. Let's stay local, but compete global. Visit us at blendmeinc. com. That's blendmeinc. com. Ever wonder how certain ads catch your attention or get stuck in your head? It's because the person voicing it knows how to tell the story. Maybe they're telling you to stumble over to Sullivan St. Patrick's day for green beers, Irish car bombs, and corned beef. Oh. Freakin day. Or maybe Don't miss the deal of a lifetime this President's Day at Callahan Ford. Savings like these should be unconstitutional. Or maybe Come wash away your troubles here at Cooter's Car Wash. We ain't no soap opery, but you'll be singing high praises. Hoo wee, Cooter's! Or Here at Brooks Brothers Mortuary, we put the fun in funeral. Everyone is just dying to join us. Alright, well that's a bit much, but for you, I'll do it. I'm Rick Haney, and if you're a business owner looking for a creative voice in your marketing, look no further. I'll tell your story the way you want it told. Follow along at Remotely We Are One, or visit my website at rickhaney. me for more information. And now, back to the show.
Rick:So obviously lately, the sizzle term has been returned to office, right? A lot of these, corporations are literally forcing people back to work to, to the physical office space. Yeah, and we also hear a lot about hospitality and offices needing to improve on their you know, operational hospitality. What are your thoughts about that conversation and the concept overall?
Francis:Well, I think what's happening now is there's, you know, you start out in a binary fashion and you wind up with something in the middle. it used to be you're in the office or you were at home.
Kaleem:right. right. right. That was hybrid bef before the pandemic hybrid was somebody in the office Monday through Friday working in the office, and then another subset of people that were fully remote. You're
Francis:Right. So, but that's now morphed into something very different. And, you know, for a lot of reasons, occupiers, tenants are very hesitant now to make big commitments. As a matter of fact, when leased space that we just had, this data came out a couple of weeks ago from CoStar, it's of the leases that had renewed in 2024, okay. So more than half a year, there was a reduction in space Total space leased by those tenants in their new space or wherever they were in a renewal. It went down by 17%. Now, 17 percent
Kaleem:That's,
Francis:legacy market is about just under a billion square feet. So, all of a sudden, kind of overnight, people are leasing. You know, a considerably smaller amount of space, uh, you know, that kind of makes sense. If you don't really know what's going to happen next, you don't want to make long term commitment. So there's a pressure on to make the commitment shorter. And when you make the commitment shorter, it becomes much more difficult to finance those from the ownership side, the landlord side. So how does this work? And you now have the, you know, the coworking firms and the flex firm stepping in. And they started out with, you know, one approach to how they financed it. Now they're becoming much more flexible and they're forming partnerships with landlords to help, you know, spread the risk and spread the return. So there's an evolution there. Those spaces, I suspect there's going to be a lot more of those because it's better to the tenants who, what the tenants really want. And when you're doing that, you can also create the additional spaces of service. Elements that an organization might want, and those can be discreet by occupier. So there's a lot of changes going on in the office world as to what's being done in the offices, how they're being serviced, what you get when you go to the office and, you know, what you get if you don't go to the office. So there's thousands of things we could talk about
Kaleem:so when you talk about hospitality, where do you, like, to me I feel kind of torn when I hear about this concept because it's like, we understand that that employers want employees to go back into the office. And then obviously the landlords, the owners of the buildings want more people in there. but it seems to me just spending a lot of money on things to try to lure people in seems kind of counterproductive and really, I feel like kind of short sighted because it's like, well, that's going to be great for a little while. Kind of like the honeymoon period. Like it's great for a little Bob, but what happens when that wears off? So like has there been so much talk about hospitality and treating it more like a hotel, like why is there a ton of talk like that, you
Francis:Well, I think that's what occupiers really want. They want to be able to figure out a way to reduce their commitments, but at the same time, improve the environment for their people so they'll come in. I mean, occupiers still, you know, this is still dominated by boomer types, like me, who, You know, have grown up in that environment as opposed to Jenny. You don't have any Gen Z presidents yet. Okay. So the mindset is to do things the way they had been done. I think it'll get better with Gen X. And certainly when millennials take over, you'll see a lot more creativity in how this is done. But, I mean, it's the commute is the thing that, that really throws everything under the bus because the average cost of the commute. Somewhere around a thousand dollars a month, 1, 200 a month. And in some cases, a lot more, some cases, less. But if you're telling an employee out of after tax money to spend 12, 000 a year to come to this office when I could be doing the same thing at the, you know, in my spare bedroom, you've got to have a rationale. So what's going to make what's going to be attractive to get them back other than being employed. You know, depending on where the market is for employment, having amenities and, you know, food and entertainment is helpful, but it doesn't overcome the commute and the cost. Frankly, in most cases, plus you'd have the flexibility that many single moms are married. If you have children, or if you have adults, parents and relatives who are, you know, need some care, you got to be much more flexible. So, I mean, that's where we find most organizations that are moving in that direction are progressive and they're coming up with ways to make that work for their organizations. It also obviously works for the employees and there tends to be a lot more loyalty, employee retention is higher and, recruiting is much, much easier if you have a flexible work environment.
Rick:Well, I mean, we all think remote is great, but often the downside is connection, right? Um, how do you think, yeah, I know you agree, Kaleem, how do you think these office spaces will be transformed to satisfy that often lack of connection with people?
Francis:I, I think, you know, the office still carries the burden of the, in-person collaboration on whatever. Okay. And it's there. And that kind of, that's a logical role for the office. we know the collaboration ranges from anywhere from 10% to 30%, maybe, maybe a little more of people's general work activity. So you've got 70%, or more that, you know, you would rather be doing someplace where you didn't have a lot of interruptions and, you know, where the, the facilities would be different if that's what you were doing. So, it's a challenging question, I think, for occupiers. A challenging question for certainly for anybody in real estate and the same thing with, uh, you know, if you're developing a strategy, how does that fit? How do you make it fit? And how does it change over time? I mean, even since the pandemic, so in four years, things have changed a lot. Okay. Uh, and we can only imagine we can only imagine what's gonna happen between now and the end of the decade. But what we do see is that the amount of real estate that's now being required being demanded by the users, okay, is shrinking, and it's getting much more flexible. The days of 15 year leases are kind of over. Okay, and if you look at the stats, if you look at the national stats on the rollovers of leases, and you plug in at the beginning of 2020, the number of leases that had, you know, 50, 000 square feet or bigger those on average had a remaining term of about 11 years. And that represents nationally about 300 to 350Million square feet of space.
Kaleem:Okay.
Francis:Those spaces are going to be rolling over the next. Five, six years.
Kaleem:Oh my gosh. You mean Those leases are up
Francis:and the CFO is going to say, Hallelujah!
Rick:Yeah.
Francis:I just saved 15 million dollars and that's big. You know, that'll happen. That will happen. And, you know, that's aside from any other shock, any other economic situation, you know, collapse in the stock market, major recession, war, any of those things that happened. And those would also have impact as well, but
Rick:Well, you mentioned, you know, economic, sorry to interrupt. You mentioned economic impact and what are your thoughts on some of the, uh, more creative, like repurposing of some of these corporate spaces? I mean, are we going to be at a point where it's, we're looking at, you know, boutiques and Airbnbs that have been repurposed from corporate environments or, you know, what are your thoughts on some of those?
Francis:Well, I think to a large extent in the legacy office environment, you know, I said this, uh, maybe a year or so ago, if I was 20 years younger, I would become a demolition contractor. Cause I think you're going to make a lot of money in the demolition business over the next 10 to 15 years. I think a large share of the legacy office stock is basically. It's not only functionally obsolete, but it's use is, is totally evaporated. Keep in mind when those, these buildings were built, every building that now exists basically was designed, even the new ones, right? But even they're better and they're better environmentally, et cetera. They were all designed under the concept that everybody gets together in one place, you know, it was big, it was deep cores. It was a totally different use.
Kaleem:offices. Tons of cubicle space.
Francis:Right, right. So you have big floor plates, which. You know, as a, as an occupier, when that was in vogue, it was very helpful. You could do a lot of interesting things there, but today, you know, those buildings don't convert well to condos or apartment, we just don't, but you got a lot of space you can't use. What can you do in there? Well, you can do vertical farming, or you can do the blind association, or you can do other people who don't really care about looking outside. And there are people who, you know, don't want to look outside, but. Most people do. So it's a problem
Kaleem:Right.
Francis:you can fix them, but the cost of making those changes.
Kaleem:outside.
Francis:Yeah. that's actually, you know, they have these new technologies. So helpful because they make these exterior windows that are actually TVs and they fit on the wall and they look like a window and the, and you actually have that camera on the outside. So you see exactly what you would see if you were, if that was a window,
Kaleem:Right. it's a wall, yeah. It's a camera. It's a camera on the outside of the bill. It's sick.
Rick:Oh my god.
Kaleem:Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy.
Francis:Oh, I mean, you could do that on a boat. That would be a good thing for an inside cabin, you know, when
Kaleem:Definitely.
Francis:a wall there with a picture of the outside,
Kaleem:but yeah, I hear what you're saying. I, Fran, I think I agree with what you're saying. A lot of these buildings, and I think downtown's a part of this association where they talk about city planning and the future of how to get traffic in and out of the city and how, whether they should use, you know, public transportation, Rideshare all that stuff and green space. Downtown's are, the new it, you know, Pittsburgh has a really new downtown project that they did. And it's all about walkability and connectivity. So I'm right. there with you. I could see people knocking down skyscrapers that were built in the fifties and sixties and having, you know, new green space and some of these new mixed use spaces. That people are developing and designing are, absolutely amazing. You know, with restaurants, coworking spaces. I mean,
Francis:And you can do that in an existing structure, but it's, it's more complicated and it makes it much more expensive. But we won't see as much of that as, as some people would like to see. I mean, everybody would like to see a way out, but I think for this, uh, it reminds me of, um, I don't know if you've ever seen, there's a video, done by Mercedes called the journey that changed everything. It's on YouTube. If you haven't seen it, it's a story of Bertha Benz, who was the wife of the guy who started Mercedes Benz. And it's a story about, and this is a true story, about how in 1883 or something like that, they had a prototype, the first car, and, She was so hyped up on the car, she decided she was going to go to meet her parents were about 180 kilometers away and she took the car with two of her Children and started driving. And you just have to watch the video. It's the birth of Ben's journey that changed everything because that's, I think, where we are with office buildings. We think about work When we say we're going to do work, are you going to go to the office? You know, because the office was the heart of work. That's where everything emanated from. And that's been the case for, you know, a hundred years. A hundred years ago, it was a paper environment. Today, there's no paper in any office anymore. Really. You have, you know, maybe a trash can for little note papers, but people don't print out paper anywhere near that where they did. They don't scan it. It's all digital. Okay. So you can be anywhere. So now the heart of the, of work, It's not in the office. It's in the cloud and you have to start thinking that way. Okay. So if you're a bright CEO or CFO, you've got to be thinking about five years from now, 10 years from now, how is this work going to be done and what should we commit to? You're not going to sign a 15 or 20 year lease on anything. Okay. Cause the rate of change is now exponential and we haven't even talked about AI and we're probably
Kaleem:Never enough time for
Rick:AI.
Kaleem:AI. Okay.
Rick:tell us about a comical or inspiring moment you had while working remotely?
Francis:Sure. It won't be as good as the hooker story. Um, but I will tell you when I first started, this is now in the last century, cause I go back a long time,
Kaleem:Okay.
Francis:when I first had my business, right.
Kaleem:So what year just what year? Yeah, give us give us the setting where we at
Francis:1994.
Kaleem:Oh shit, okay. Okay. Okay. I'm pimping. I think I have a six pack Well, not a six pack but a two pack at this point. I have a two pack bro.
Francis:So anyway, so I started this business is just me, you know, I quit, I went, you know, I started opened up, and I'm sitting in the same room actually in the same house. We've been in the same house all the time. It's great house. But we have two small children. Now, my son would be about two or three and my daughter was one and we had the world's. best nanny. We somehow found this woman who was a, she was a grandmother type person and she did a wonderful job with the kids. She did everything, did the laundry. But so we, and we were really sorry to lose her after about five years. But so the kids would be in the downstairs with the nanny who would be, you know, entertaining them and feeding them and doing whatever you could do with kids, which is a lot of fun stuff. So occasionally my son would kind of escape and call up the stairs. And knock on the door, you know, cause the door would be closing. Daddy, you know, daddy. So I remember this one time, there was a new client, prospect. We were just about to do the deal with that. And of course at that, in that period, sounding like you were working, we're working and weren't working in an office, you're working in a home who would want to deal with that guy. You know, you started in an office, right? It was a big push for me to go to the office, figure out how to finance that. But the door knocked and I, you know, explained that I thought my son was downstairs. He
Kaleem:you're on a car you're on a call. because there's no vid. There's no, video back
Francis:no, nobody. This is the phone call, speakerphone, I think. And, so, you know, the client said, Nope, don't worry about it. It's not a problem. So he left. And then, you know, Actually, about the next week at about the same time, somehow he did the same thing. And I'm on this, on the phone with this same client and I thought he was going to get really irritated, you know, and he's like, no, no, no, bring him in. I want to talk to him, you know, so I bring my son and he has this conversation. Damn, if he didn't sign the contract. So,
Rick:you a solid!
Francis:yeah, so I didn't, well I, you know, what do you, you know, it was just, it was fun stuff and you know, who are you, are you working with my daddy? You know? It was just a, it was a great memory
Rick:that's precious.
Francis:but that's a long time ago today. Now you have, if you have a child to come to you to put him on the video
Kaleem:yeah. Yeah, but I mean just thinking about 94 like the conference call how intense it was, you know, like you had it in the middle of your thing you just put it on speakerphone and you were still remote. You're still
Francis:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna be so much better in the future. You're gonna have holograms, they're gonna be great.
Rick:oh.
Francis:You're not going to have cars. The car is going to pick you up with the right class car for wherever you're going. It's going to be such a wonderful world. Hope
Rick:We're really looking forward to that. So friend, where can our listeners and viewers find you?
Kaleem:Yeah. Fran's
Francis:come over,
Rick:where you are. You're going to be where you're at.
Francis:me up in the phone.
Kaleem:is no, I'm just
Rick:There.
Francis:No, I say, um, uh, a couple of places that you can go to LinkedIn. A lot of people watching are on LinkedIn. It's Fran dash Saele, uh, you know, linkedin. com. I am, and then Fran Saele, uh, you just put in Fran or Francis Sally. I usually come up there. That's okay. we have a website, but we're redoing it. But you can come in and leave a message there. It should be up in about a month or so, maybe two months, mortevita. com. M O R T E V I T A dot com. And of course there's email too. If someone wants to email me, they can do that. That's on the website or it's on LinkedIn. You can get the email
Rick:Cool.
Kaleem:Great.
Rick:Well, we cannot thank you enough. What an episode.
Kaleem:Great time, Fran. Thank you so much. Well,
Francis:but you know,
Kaleem:I don't think we'll get. Good point. Good point. Can we, we'll find out. We'll find out if it. passes the YouTube thing.
Rick:heh
Francis:It's a good thing we didn't talk about OJ Simpson. That's all I got to say.
Kaleem:that's a very good point. You are from Buffalo. We are from Buffalo. But thank you so much, man, so much knowledge in here. Really appreciate it, man. Come back anytime. So, uh, yeah, we'll talk to you, uh, soon, man. Appreciate you.
Francis:It's a fun time. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Great
Rick:Yes.
Francis:you for an hour.
Rick:Oh, likewise. Thank you.
