BROKERS TURNING TO COMPUTERS TO GET RETAILERS INTO THE TENT

As reported by John Holusha for the NY Times, Retailing, it has been said, is a form of show business, with a store's signs, decorations and merchandise displays all intended to entice passers-by to come inside.

What then for a real estate broker who has retailers as clients? How do you impress people who already know all the tricks of attracting the eye of prospects?

Charles Aug, the chairman of Garrick-Aug Associates, which specializes in retail leases and sales, thinks part of the answer is to compile large masses of geographic and demographic information, load it into computers and display it on five video screens in a technology center at his headquarters at 360 Lexington Avenue at 40th Street.

And because the information can be transmitted over the Web to remote locations, retailers thinking of opening stores in metropolitan New York can eliminate sites that do not conform to their formula before ever visiting the area.

Aug is not the only real estate broker to add electronic communications to his sales toolbox. Many firms have Web sites so prospective customers can view listings anytime.

Cushman & Wakefield, a big commercial real estate concern, has an electronic display on the ground floor of its headquarters at 52d Street and the Avenue of the Americas that emphasizes its worldwide scope. The display is in the form of a world map with screens that can show company offices or properties that it is selling or leasing.

The display is in a space designed to catch the eye and can also be used for special presentations. "The space, the technology and the environment are designed to send a message about out firm," said David M. Gialanella, an executive managing director of the company.

When an important foreign client visited recently, the display was converted into a reception area, complete with catered food. "We have 40 modules that can display the markets we are in and our capabilities," he said.

Aug concedes that the information presented electronically does not go much beyond what was previously available in printed or photographic form. But he said using computers to project 360-degree images of buildings, to walk down streets visually without leaving the room and to display data graphically in addition to the images increases the power of presentations.

"Displaying facts on a media wall should tend to draw people in more than flipping pages in a book," he said. "This makes it easier to absorb the information, and the more information a merchant has, the more likely he is to make a decision to come here."

In the technology center, a 48-inch central screen is surrounded by four 29-inch screens. The most important information, like the position of a store in a neighborhood, is displayed on the larger screen while ancillary information, like traffic counts, the location of competitors and transportation services, can be shown in relation to it on the auxiliary screens.

The New York region is attractive to retailers despite the high costs, because the sheer mass of people means the potential of high sales. Aug said some stores on Fulton Street in Brooklyn have sales of $1,000 per square foot a year. "There's not a suburban mall in the country that can match that," he said.

This attractiveness is the reason that national chains like Payless Shoes and Gap stores have been replacing locally owned stores in New York neighborhoods, he said.

"The greater New York region is about 10 percent of the national population," he said, which makes it a must for any chain of stores that considers itself national.

But the area is also complex. Aug said his firm had identified 300 retail districts within the metropolitan area, each with its own characteristics.

To help a retailer make sense of the various retail districts, Aug can provide information on highway traffic counts for suburban locations mainly accessed by cars. In the city, pedestrian counts or subway turnstile counts provide information on potential traffic.

The displays can also help with what are known as polygon studies for retailers. In typical studies, concentric rings are drawn around a location and the number of potential customers within different distances are calculated.

But often there is a natural barrier, like a river or a highway that clips off part of the circle and reduces the size of the market. Understanding how a market is affected by these barriers is easier on a moving screen than a series of pictures or diagrams, Aug said.

Time saving is the other major advantage of the system, said Peter Botsaris, the president of Garrick-Aug. "If you have people coming in that are interested in 60 sites across the metropolitan area, that's going to take a lot of time to visit," he said. "If you can sit them down in the technology center and give them a virtual-reality tour, you can eliminate a lot of physical trips."

Better yet, he said, clients can do some of the triage in advance. "We represent or work with almost every national chain," he said. "We can provide them with a password and let them point and click their way through the region."