Major Connecticut landlord Griffin Land is bullish on prospects for filling up its vacant Hartford area commercial space and for keeping the rest filled, its parent company’s chief executive says.
In remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday at Griffin Land & Nurseries Inc.’s annual meeting in New York, CEO Frederick M. Danziger said the Bloomfield-based land division’s leasing activity so far this year is strong.
Griffin Land so far has leases for about 65,000 square feet of once-empty office space in the Hartford market, Danziger said. Those leases will generate income and cash flow, starting later this year.
In addition, the landlord is in talks, he said, with tenants about renewing a majority of the 165,000 square feet of industrial space on which leases are due to expire the remainder of this year. Griffin also is fielding queries about leasing some of its empty industrial space, although no leases have been signed, the CEO said.
Danziger said Griffin Land’s leasing experience so far runs counter to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s latest forecast that vacancies among the Hartford area’s 1.2 million square feet of industrial space will climb.
Griffin Land is one of Connecticut’s largest private landowners. Its holdings include Griffin Center, an industrial-warehouse-office park straddling Bloomfield and Windsor.
Meantime, Danziger told stockholders that Griffin has seen unseasonably warm weather lead to a demand pickup in its landscape nursery business, with retail sales from its Imperial Nurseries’ Connecticut farm up 20 percent in the first four months of this year compared to a year earlier.
Yet, wholesale nursery sales remain weak, the CEO said, reflecting slumping demand from landscaping firms and builders.
