The new owners of the landmark Union Trust building in downtown Providence will soon provide commercial tenants in the building with free Wi-Fi Internet access, an internal Web portal and other “intelligent building” features. FB Capital Partners, the Philadelphia-based private investment firm that purchased the 107-year-old building at 170 Westminster St. in July, is installing the technology upgrades to attract new tenants to the building, which is half empty, said Matt Fair, a broker for Hayes & Sherry Real Estate Services, which is marketing and leasing the office space. The 12-story, 62,000-square-foot structure at Westminster and Dorrance streets is better known as the Federal Reserve building, in honor of the nationally acclaimed restaurant that occupies the entire first floor. The building, which features well-preserved Victorian architecture, was reportedly the tallest in New England when it was built in 1901.

FB Capital purchased the building for $6.5 million from Granoff Realty LP on July 3. The firm hopes installing cutting-edge IT infrastructure in the historic building will attract technology companies and businesses and organizations from other industries to fill the 24,000 square feet of Class B office space available in the building, including four full floors, Fair said. “This is a well-positioned building with great history and architecture that we’re converting,” he said “The whole idea is to bring the technology into the building, provide the tenants with better services in order to retain them longer.”

In the first phase of the project, which Fair said will be completed by the end of the year, the building will be fitted with a broadband system that provides tenants with free Wi-Fi and an internal Web portal, designed primarily to enable tenants to instantly communicate with the building’s managers and superintendent about leaks, broken light bulbs and other maintenance issues. A large, interactive digital directory of the building’s tenants will be installed in the lobby. Depending on demand, FB Capital also would wire the building with a high-bandwidth backbone that gives tenants instant data access at up to 100 megabits per second, Fair said. That phase of the project, which would require a significant capital investment and would take about a year to install, could begin next year if the building becomes fully occupied, Fair said.  “Instead of a tenant having to have Internet service through Verizon or Cox [Communications], the building [would] have one of those providers hooked up to the building,” he said. “The wiring is already going to be in place, so when a tenant moves in, they’re not going to have to wire anything. They just plug right in and they’re connected.”

The technology upgrades represents the rollout of FB Capital’ new “iBuilding” platform, an initiative in some of the firm’s commercial properties spearheaded by Gary Brandeis, a managing director at the firm who formerly ran the national technology group at Lincoln Property Co., one of the larger commercial real estate companies in the country.  In a new investment strategy, FB Capital Partners is buying older, Class B office buildings throughout country and installing technology upgrades to boost the long-term value of the properties, Brandeis said. “We’ve been fortunate enough to find a good opportunity here in Providence to acquire a building that really fits well into this strategy of taking a beautiful, historic building that’s kind of a landmark in the city, and leaving the integrity of the building alone but making the components in the building smart, intelligent and forward-thinking,” he said. “We understand the real estate business, and we understand the technology business,” he added, “and by bringing those things together, we believe we can offer a unique piece of real estate, a unique office experience to our tenants.” In addition to filling the building with technology businesses, marketing companies, law firms, nonprofit organizations and other traditional commercial tenants, FB Capital would like to create a business incubator or shared workspace for independent freelancers and entrepreneurs, Fair said.

Brandeis and Hayes & Sherry are working with the R.I. Economic Development Corporation to attract a third party that could help to finance a shared-workspace business model in the building, Fair said. “The folks from FB Capital bought the building with the intention of making an iBuilding – that’s really exciting for us,” said Stuart Freiman, the EDC’s communications and information technology sector lead. “Essentially, it demonstrates to us yet again that somebody from outside Rhode Island sees the value of bringing that kind of building into Rhode Island, and sees the opportunity to create space for our IT and digital media folks.” •