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Corporate Accommodations provides temporary home-away-from-home
Wednesday, November 22, 2000 By Joyce Gannon, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When your business is providing housing for busy professional people, Paul Bates figures something as seemingly minor as a burnt kitchen spatula or a cracked drinking glass can be catastrophic.
Bates runs Corporate Accommodations Inc., a Green Tree firm that provides long-term apartments to professionals and others who must stay in Pittsburgh for more than a few nights and who would rather avoid hotels and motels.
So if an executive or any other customer has a bad experience with the kitchen cutlery, or if the mattress isn't up to par, Bates worries.
"It's our job to make everyone comfortable so they can do their jobs."
Corporate Accommodations leases one- and two-bedroom units at apartment complexes throughout the region, including the Penthouse Apartments, Downtown; the Schenley House, Oakland; the Polo Club, Moon; Chestnut Ridge, Robinson; Oakmont Landing, Oakmont; and Village of Laurelwood, Cranberry.
And with a total of 160 units, it's the largest of three big firms that cater to the home-away-from-home crowd -- the others are BridgeStreet Accommodations, a subsidiary of MeriStar Hotels & Resorts of Washington, D.C., with about 140 apartments Downtown and in the suburbs; and Gaithersburg, Md.-based ExecuStay by Marriott, which leases 105 apartments around the region.
Corporate Accommodations also competes indirectly with a number of suite hotels that have tried to capture a piece of the market by offering kitchenettes, free breakfasts and lower rates on long-term stays. They include Candlewood Suites and Extended StayAmerica.
For an average $65 to $75 a night, Corporate Accommodations' tenants get fully furnished units with equipped kitchens, telephones, answering machines, expanded cable television, weekly housekeeping and, in the city properties, valet parking. Its suburban apartments include pools and exercise facilities.
By comparison, prices at BridgeStreet properties range from $69 to $150, said Jack Mild, general manager of the Pittsburgh office, and from $62 to $100 at ExecuStay. The $100 ExecuStay units have three bedrooms, said general manager Holly Visnic Pelusi.
At Corporate Accommodations, where occupancy rates run from 85 to 90 percent, tenants range from professionals who are relocating to Pittsburgh and want a temporary place to live while they search for a house and move the rest of their family here, to business people assigned to long-term projects to families who need a place to stay while their homes are being repaired after a fire or flood. Guests stay about 10 weeks on average.
Though demand from business people doing projects or consulting work is brisk in the colder months, Bates said overall occupancy was higher in the summer. That's when people prefer to relocate their families and look for permanent homes, he said, and when families visit relatives but want their own places to stay.
Bates, 51, had no previous experience in the housing industry before he launched Corporate Accommodations in 1991.
A native of Washington, D.C., who grew up near Dayton, Ohio, Bates pursued general studies at Ohio University. After college, he worked at or managed a handful of small businesses, including a bar and an antiques dealership, before becoming part owner of an interior design business in Florida in the late 1980s.
After his third child was born in 1990, Bates' wife, a Pittsburgh native, wanted to relocate to her hometown.
So Bates sold his share of the design business, and they headed north.
A few months later, at one of his children's baseball games, he learned that some business people were looking to invest in the corporate housing industry in Pittsburgh.
He got involved in the group, which put together $180,000, leased some units in Downtown, Oakland and Shadyside, and began knocking on company doors to drum up business.
Slowly, they attracted customers and expanded their inventory to the suburbs -- but not before Corporate Accommodations ran out of cash in 1992.
Bates approached the other investors for help, but none agreed to put up any money.
So he presented his wife with these options: He could shut down the company and look for a job elsewhere; or cash out their personal savings and life insurance and pour it into the company. She agreed to keep the business going and the next year, 1993, it turned a profit.
For this year, Bates expects the company to generate $3 million in sales. Among its clients are PPG Industries Inc., Nova Chemicals, Bayer, State Farm Insurance, Sargent Electric and Consol.
Bates has 14 full-time employees who handle sales, housekeeping and customer service.
The customer service team's responsibility ranges from touching up paint and scheduling carpet cleaning, to reprogramming VCRs and replacing broken coffee makers.
So how often is Corporate Accommodations stuck with empty apartments because a customer cancels or finds the mattress too soft?
"I don't look at it like a cancellation," said Bates. "I say, 'Great. Now there's something open when the phone rings again.' "
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