Life at Sentry Commercial

Sentry Commercial Welcomes Stephanie Romano to The Brokerage and Advisory Team!
Very excited to officially welcome the newest addition to our Brokerage and Advisory Team, Stephanie Romano!
Stephanie is an experienced advisor in the CRE industry and is a part of the small handful of women specializing in Industrial Brokerage in the state of Connecticut and Southern New England. We are very lucky to have her on our team!

Happy Easter From Sentry Commercial!
Sentry Commercial wishes our partners and community a very happy and safe Easter!

BISNOW Webinar National Broker Roundtable
Sentry Commercial’s President and Co-Founder, Mark Duclos, SIOR, CRE, FRICS, will be a speaker in Bisnow’s National Industrial Broker Roundtable on Wednesday, March 31st!
Register to hear from top industrial brokers on how they are identifying opportunities and utilizing data, the trends they are seeing, and much more here.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Our team at Sentry Commercial hopes that you find more luck per square foot this St. Patrick’s Day – and maybe some gold too!

Sentry Commercial’s President and Co-Founder, Mark Duclos, SIOR, CRE, FRICS, Recognized in CREi
Congratulations to Sentry Commercial’s President and co-founder, Mark Duclos, SIOR, CRE, FRICS, for being recognized in CREi: The 2021 Top LinkedIn Influencer’s in Commercial Real Estate!
Thank you to our wonderful partners for this recognition, and congratulations to all of those who made it!
For more information about CREi, click here.

Happy Employee Appreciation Day!
Without our team and their caring, collaborative efforts – Sentry Commercial would not be standing as strong as it is today. So here is a great big “thank you” to the team, your commitment is appreciated and deeply valued!

Wishing Chris Duclos a Happy Birthday!
A very happy birthday to Sentry Commercial’s Industrial Specialist, Chris Duclos! We hope you have an amazing day and a fantastic year!

Happy Sentry-Versary to Melissa Fernance!
Happy Sentry-Versary to Sentry Commercial’s team member, Melissa Fernance! March marks 22 years with Melissa! Thank you both for always caring, connecting, and collaborating with our team and partners!

Happy Sentry-Versary to Leeann Duclos
Happy Sentry-Versary to this month’s team member, Leeann Duclos! Leann will have been with Sentry Commercial for 4 years. Thank you for all that you do!

Happy President’s Day from Sentry Commercial!
Our team at Sentry Commercial wishes our partners a a healthy and happy President’s Day!

Happy Birthday to One of Our Industrial Specialists, Nicholas Pinto!
Sentry Commercial wishes a very happy birthday to one of our Industrial Specialists, Nicholas Pinto! May this year bring you more laughter and success, per square foot!

Levere’s Nonprofit Partnerships
Larry Levere, SIOR, Sentry Commercial’s Director of Office Brokerage, has been involved with non-profit partnerships for a duration of his time as an SIOR. His teamwork with nonprofit partnerships includes the representation of office users/buyers and landlords/sellers. His partnership with the nonprofit, FAVARH, has allowed him to join its Board, eventually furthering as Board President for numerous years.
Listed below are various other non-profit partnerships that Levere has been honored to partake in:
- Everyday Democracy
- Plan of CT
- Journey Home / A Hand Up
- FAVARH
- The Bridge Family Center
- CT Association for Human Services
- HEDCO Inc.
- Brain Injury Alliance CT
- Dialysis Clinic, Inc.
- Compass Youth Collaborative
- New Samaritan Corporation
- American Cancer Society
- Connecticut AFL-CIO
Sentry Commercial values the relationships built within the CRE industry. Our team has found significant importance in partnering with nonprofit organizations, as nonprofits provide critical services to the community while building economic stability. Nonprofits strengthen communities, especially as they come together to build on their legacy and their essential rule to the future. Our team finds it honorable and rewarding to belong to projects that have an impact on the legacy of our community and beyond.

Building Foundations Breakfast
Caring. Community. Collaboration. This hits on three of Sentry Commercial’s core “C’s”!! Could not be prouder to participate in and support THE signature Greater Hartford Commercial Real Estate event in 2021. The Building Foundations breakfast is scheduled for February 4, 2021 and will provide resources to the Greater Hartford CT area to help prevent children and families from slipping into homelessness. It is a COLLABORATIVE effort of many in this region’s commercial real estate community. SO cool to see and such a great cause! All us at Sentry Commercial are grateful to be part of such a fantastic community.
Interested in Participating? Click here.

Happy New Year From Sentry Commercial!
This unexpected year has proven to us that our community thrives from collaboration and care – two principles that our team at Sentry Commercial holds to the highest regard. With our new home at The REC Hartford and a fresh outlook on what a new year will bring, we are eager to see move forward into 2021! Bring it on!
Have a happy and healthy new year!

Sentry Commercial’s Murder Mystery Holiday Event!
Great time at the Sentry Commercial Holiday Event! So thankful we had so many of our people join us at our Murder Mystery! So cool to see everyone get into it as much as they did! Happy Holidays everyone! #LifeatSentryCommercial

Happy Holidays From Sentry Commercial!
Happy holidays from your team at Sentry Commercial! Stay warm, safe, and enjoy the valuable time with your loved ones during this holiday season.

SIOR’s Leadership to Extend Into 2021
The Sentry Commercial team would like to personally congratulate our President, Mark Duclos, SIOR, CRE, FRICS, on an extended Presidency at the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR).
Due to the world’s current situation, SIOR has proactively decided to extend all current leadership roles by one year.
Duclos will remain President of SIOR into 2021, and we are confident (and proud) that with this leadership, SIOR will be well-positioned to succeed, guide our community, and emerge stronger than ever before.
Read more and view the full list of SIOR’s Board of Directors, Regional Directors, Committee Chairs, and Vice-Chairs: https://www.sior.com/education-and-insights/insights/latest-news-article/2020/05/26/sior-elects-2020officers

Sentry Commercial is now on YouTube!
Our team is proud to announce that Sentry Commercial is now on YouTube!
If you haven’t checked out our new channel yet, head on over to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfmFGKNSrnMgKdrIrMXrBFw
Be sure to subscribe and check back regularly for the latest news, updates, tours, and more from our team!

SIOR’s Mark Duclos on Serving as a Resource for Members and Communities During COVID-19
Our President, Mark Duclos, SIOR, CRE, FRICS was recently interviewed by SIOR about the pandemic and its effect on the industrial category. We couldn’t be more proud of him for offering his time and tools through SIOR to spread the word and assist our friends and community! Read the full article and Q&A below.
This article is from Connect Media and has been republished with permission from Connect Media.
April 7, 2020
By Paul Bubny
If any property sector seems better positioned than others during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s industrial, at least from the standpoint of a casual observer. The boom in e-commerce has gotten a turbo boost from consumers who are living under government-mandated shelter-in-place orders. However, SIOR President Mark Duclos, an industrial broker himself as president of Sentry Commercial, notes that many other industries that drive demand for industrial space have been hit hard by the shutdown. In this interview with Connect Media, Duclos discusses the impact that COVID-19 has had on industrial and the ways that SIOR has surmounted its temporary inability to hold conferences and become a resource for both its own membership and the communities in which they operate.
Q: What impact has the economic shutdown from COVID-19 had on industrial, or is it too soon to tell?
A: It’s still early in the game. As long as we’ve been in this already, it’s still early in terms of understanding how this is going to affect the market long-term. Short-term, it has absolutely affected the market. The $2-trillion stimulus package is certainly going to be a big help. But you also have supply chains that were affected by the original events in China, and now with the coronavirus happening here, there has been further disruption. However, it seems that supply chains in areas like grocery have stabilized. You’re seeing a better flow of product into grocery stores. On the e-commerce side, Walmart and Amazon have said that they’re hiring and are likely to continue hiring through May. There are certain winners here that are continuing to do what they were doing before the coronavirus, and then some. And there are losers, certainly: the airline industry, retail, the oil and gas industry. Short-term, these companies are in a lot of pain. How long it will take them to get out of it, which affects the long-term prospects for industrial—we don’t know yet.
Q: This is different from something like the 2008 financial crisis, in terms of predicting how it will unfold.
A: Absolutely. In the 2008 financial crisis, you had a meltdown of the financial markets. Here, the financial markets were very healthy. One of the beauties of being in an organization like SIOR is that we have online forums, and our members, some of whom are landlords as well as brokers, have a view into the open market in terms of advising our clients how to proceed. We’re seeing the issue of rent forgiveness coming up, and the other thing we’re seeing on the lending side is three months or six months of interest-only payments, and tag that onto the back of an existing loan. But this is happening very much on a case-by-case basis. Some companies are doing well and don’t need the relief, while others won’t be back in the swing of things for a while.
Q: How is belonging to an organization like SIOR especially valuable at a time like this? And how are members networking in the absence of face-to-face contact?
A: It’s not that you don’t have emergency plans in place, but nobody had a plan for the country being suddenly locked down. So, we’ve been looking at what we can best do as an organization to provide our members with some resources they can use to run their business. Physical networking is gone for a while. We had to cancel our TransACT 360 conference that was scheduled to take place at the end of April, and we’re not holding SIOR chapter meetings. In addition to the open forum, we set up an online town hall where we can discuss specific topics, and share initiatives that we’ve been working on with the members. We’re replacing the lost opportunities from the live events. Forty percent of our membership is independent brokers, and they use SIOR predominantly for information like this.
Q: Talk about SIOR CARE and the impetus behind launching this initiative.
A: When you’re in a situation like this as a group, the first thing you do is to look inward and say, “What do I need to do to survive this crisis?” Then you take a deep breath and say, “How can we help others survive a crisis like this? How can we use our skillsets as brokers and advisors in the real estate industry to help others?” Therefore, we launched the SIOR CARE [Community Assistance and Relief in Emergencies] program in order to reach out to communities—nonprofits, but also for-profits as well—on anything we can do to help them with their real estate resources. It might be a food bank that’s looking for additional warehouse space. It might be the Red Cross that needs more temporary facilities for blood drives. We’re excited to see how this develops.

We’re Still Here For You!
Today’s crisis is certainly creating challenges for all of us, personally and professionally.
Sentry Commercial wants you to know we are here to help you. Our Brokerage & Advisory, Construction Management, Property Management and Residential Services Group were built to operate remotely.
While our physical offices are closed, we are very much providing our clients the service and advice you have come to expect over the last 30 years.
Through it all, please stay safe and healthy.