Page 65 - BusinessWest November 28, 2022

features a treatment depicting several of the landmark buildings in downtown Springfield — Tower Square, Monarch Place, the Colonial Block, the Campanielle, among others.
It’s one of the countless touches in the Wil- low State Building (so-called because it sits at the corner of Willow and State streets in downtown Springfield), which he co-owns with a few part- ners, that he did himself.
cial Realty being the other.
Both have been works in progress and studies
in entrepreneurship, resourcefulness, and well, different ways of doing things.
In many respects, anyway.
Indeed, Casey said the fundamentals of the commercial real-estate business, mostly the same as they are in banking, have not changed and won’t change.
methodologies we used in the startup world and took them to commercial real estate,” he explained. “Specifically, that means listening
to customers, not just coming up with what we think, but listening to where the pain points are in the industry.
“And, candidly, there were a lot of them,” he went on, adding that the company was founded with that focus on marketing, communication,
and responsiveness.
With marketing, as he said earlier, the goal
was to push the envelope and look for new, dif- ferent, and more effective ways to do things.
“The way things were marketed before, you put a sign up, and you put the property on LoopNet or maybe that book you see in the convenience store,” he explained. “No one was using social media, no one was using video, no one was using professional photography.”
Partnering with Seven Roads Media (so named because it was based in East Longmead- ow, where seven roads come together at that famous rotary), which is now a tenant in the Wil- low State Building, SR Commercial Realty worked to take commercial real-estate marketing to the proverbial next level with video and other strate- gies, including large signs.
“The largest sign we did was nine by 18 feet, and we did two of them — they were so large, they needed wind slits,” said Casey, referring to a property in Middletown, Conn. “We’ve painted buildings to bring attention to them ... we try to get as much exposure as possible.”
This is what Casey meant by ‘noisy,’ which
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“Commercial real estate has been the same forever, but it will change, whether people like it or not. Technology will pay a huge role, and that gives us a good competitive advantage, because we’ve already been using it.”
In fact, the partners did just about everything themselves, he went on, pointing to everything from the red, black, gray, and a little bit of green paint used on the walls in the SR Commercial Realty offices to the bathroom fixtures in all the suites; from the exterior façade (more black)
to build-out for several new tenants, which range from Suit Up Springfield to HomeCare Hands to a new restaurant in the early stages of construction.
“We’ve put thousands of hours into this prop- erty — we’ve been working on it for three years straight,” he said, adding that he and his part- ners have succeeded in creating what he called a “community.”
The Willow State Building has been a passion for Casey since he and his partners acquired it just prior to the start of the pandemic — or, more accurately, one of his passions, with SR Commer-
Both sectors are grounded in relationship building and responding to the needs of custom- ers, he explained, noting that he has taken these principles from his time in banking to this next chapter in his career.
This chapter started just after the demise of Name Net Worth, a very difficult time in Casey’s life, one when he looked inward and decided to move forward rather than look back or dwell on the present.
“I could have sat there and pouted and gone ‘poor me’ ... it was a tough time, I had a newborn baby, we just bought a house, and we were gut- ting the house and redoing it, and I had no job, nothing,” he recalled, adding that he called his eventual business partner, who already had a small commercial real-estate business, and pro- posed a new venture.
“I linked up with him, and we took the same
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