Few people know the ins and outs of Cummings Center in Beverly like Stephen Drohosky. He started his CRE career with Cummings Properties in 1997 after five years spent practicing commercial litigation as a lawyer. Drohosky initially joined Cummings as litigation counsel, but after putting the bug in company founder Bill Cummings’ ear that he was interested in moving to the business side of things, two years later he became operations manager for the company. Then director of operations. And finally in 2006, he started his current job as general manager responsible for all daily operations in Beverly, including leasing, operations, construction and customer service. He oversees about 150 client firms, as well as about 100 people on his staff.  Stephen Drohosky

Title: Vice President/General Manager for Cummings Center in Beverly
Age: 45
Experience: 15 years

Q: You’ve been working on a solar project here, and there has been some sizable leasing activity lately. Can you talk about the projects you’ve been working on?

A:    There has been a lot going on at Cummings Center. We completed two very large tenant build-outs recently. One was for Xylem, a big company that moved out of a building it owned in Gloucester, and is taking about 40,000 square feet in this building, 100 Cummings Center. And American Renal is about a 50,000-square-foot build-out at 500 Cummings Center. Those two have consumed quite a bit of our time over the last two months. We’re also building a 440-car parking deck in front of the 500 Cummings Center building. We have enough parking at Cummings Center, but we don’t have enough right where people want it, which is right in front of their front door. And our largest solar installation on the new parking deck will be about 1,600 solar panels.

Q: In the cases of Xylem and American Renal, was that space that had been sitting vacant, or that you knew was coming available? Explain some of that process.

A:    The majority of the Xylem space was formerly occupied by Microsoft, which decided to relocate its software-writing functions that were located here down to Cambridge, where it had leased something like 150,000 square feet and [was] only occupying about a third of it, so their long-term plan was to consolidate from different areas into Cambridge at some point. They had about 60,000 square feet at 100 Cummings Center. So, that gave us a big space back about two years ago. We knew we wanted to lease that in a large block, and then we found Xylem.

Q:    And they’re taking 40,000 square feet of that. What’s happening to the other 20,000 square feet?

A:    We did a few things with that. We drove a common-area hallway through it and created … small offices with utilities that we call entrepreneur suites for one or two people. We have a longstanding thought that runs through our company that if we can incubate small clients, quite a few of them turn into medium-sized and then larger-sized clients that stay with us.

Q:    And what was the space that American Renal took?

A:    That was the last large space that had never been leased at 500 Cummings Center. It’s a 300,000-square-foot building that was finished in 2003. We built it for a larger client with big floor plates, so it fit what American Renal was looking for. And now we’re building another building on the southwest corner of our campus. We’ve driven the piles and will install the foundation during this building season. We’ll likely stop there and focus on some other projects and then pick it up next year. That will be a six-story, 80,000-square-foot building … that we’re building on spec. It was originally permitted as a hotel, but it’s still unclear whether and to what extent it will house a hotel.

Q:    Are there any trends you can identify from recent leasing activity?

A:    We have about 600,000 square feet of space that is occupied by life sciences firms. That’s one of the largest clusters of life science spaces outside of Cambridge. But their build-outs tend to be quite expensive, so there’s a little tension between an established company and a start-up lab. The start-up usually doesn’t have much money to spend on lab space, but for their research they still need a space that’s rather expensive to build. But we have in-house staff … that has figured out how to build and design a laboratory at lower costs. Lots of times that includes using recycled materials, like reusing a hood that might not be new, but is perfectly fine and just needs to be painted and is a third of the price of a new one.