RUSS LYNCH / RLYNCH@STARBULLETIN.COM Waikiki Trade Center General Manager Daisy C. Yamada is trying unconventional approaches to fill vacant space in the building.

Not a free lunch,
but ...

The 22-story Waikiki Trade Center
is trying free hula lessons, hiking and
camaraderie help to lure tenants

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

Tenants of a Waikiki high-rise office and retail building are being treated to hula lessons, seminars on how to publicize themselves, hiking trips and other extras all for no charge.

And while the programs started with the building management wanting to promote new office space opening up on the seventh floor, they quickly turned into a friendly mutual-help program, with tenants offering services to one another.

The building is the 22-story Waikiki Trade Center, owned for the last decade by Japan-based Wang International Kabushiki Kaisha.

While other buildings offer rent reductions and service add-ons to attract and keep tenants, the Waikiki Trade Center at the corner of Seaside Avenue and Kuhio Avenue has almost accidentally found itself building a social atmosphere that delivers the same results, said public relations consultant and tenant Mona K. Wood.

Wood's company, Ikaika Communications, is providing free public relations help and also helping the building management firm, Property Concepts Group Inc., issue a monthly tenants' newsletter and provide other services.

"Everyone is giving price breaks, dollars for build-outs (improvements) and so on but this is the first time I've heard of a building really trying to build a community and offering classes for personal, cultural and business growth," Wood said.

Since her company took over the management of the building in 1992, Daisy C. Yamada, Waikiki Trade Center general manager, has had ideas about filling the building's vacant space. Most of it is on the seventh floor.

At that time the seventh floor, which has about three times the space of any ordinary floor in the building, was almost totally empty. It had the management office and nothing else.

That led to Phase One, the addition of 10 new offices of 300 to 700 square feet. There was a demand for smaller spaces and they were quickly leased, she said. In the ensuing years, Jetours Hawaii, a Japanese tour operator, leased 13,000 square feet on that floor, bringing it to about half full.

RUSS LYNCH / RLYNCH@STARBULLETIN.COM The Waikiki Trade Center is offering free hula lessons, free PR help and guided hikes as lures to attract tenants.

Jetours went out of business in the mid-1990s, leaving that space empty. Again Yamada split it up into smaller units, this time 21 new offices. Phase Three is now being launched, comprised of spaces mostly between 600 and 700 square feet, with three larger spots.

"It all started with the seventh floor," said Yamada. In the process of subdividing the floor into small office spaces, she created a conference room for use by all tenants, and she developed the concept of having tenants get to know each other through social events in the conference room.

At the same time she could educate them about the spaces coming up on that floor and perhaps get them interested in moving -- existing Waikiki Trade Center tenants get first crack at the new spaces or spreading the word to friends and business associates.

The social gatherings quickly expanded into other activities as tenants offered to do things for each other. Wood did public relations seminars for the tenants, whom Yamada described as mostly Japanese small-business entrepreneurs.

Most of them had no idea how to get the word out about what they do and how to grab free publicity chances, Wood said.

Real estate consultant and avid outdoorsman Richard Daggett, who has a 230-square-foot office on the seventh floor, offered to take groups of tenants with him to hike Oahu's trails.

Former "Miss Aloha Hula" Regina Makaikai Igarashi, a Hawaiian culture expert on the staff of RAJA International Hawaii, a ninth-floor tenant, had friends who want a place to do hula and teach others.

"I asked if (building management) could let us use some space and as part of it I would offer free lessons to the others in the building," she said.

Joining in with her is a former Mrs. Hawaii, Pohai Au, who comes from a different hula halau but works with her at RAJA, which stands for Reflexology Association of Japan. It advertises itself as providing a mixture of "healing experience" and cultural education in the interests of wellness. In Hawaii that translates into a traditional Polynesian health treatment course, with lomilomi (massage) as well as Hawaiian language, music and crafts. RAJA offers that to Japanese visitors in what it calls a miniature cultural immersion program.

It is unusual for that level of activity to develop in a commercial building, said Steven Yago, vice president of another commercial building management company, American Land Co.

Tenants "have their own little communities, friends they talk to and so on. There are social functions" and sometimes holiday get-togethers in a building, but he hadn't heard of hula lessons and the like, he said.

The Waikiki Trade Center still has plenty of empty space, and, for the foreseeable future, Yamada said the building will be able to provide free space to the tenants for the new functions. But her goal is to fill much of that space with new tenants.