With offices already half empty, CT town loses another employer
WILTON — Online survey pioneer Toluna is the latest company to leave town, which was an early destination for city dwellers seeking suburban living during the COVID pandemic, but has also endured a recent surge of businesses packing up.
Toluna is moving south on Route 7 to the Merritt 7 Corporate Park in Norwalk, taking 8,000 square feet of space in the complex located just off the Merritt Parkway.
It is the second major employer Wilton has lost in recent weeks, after Beiersdorf chose Stamford for a new office. And after spending $245 million three years ago to acquire SiriusDecisions in Wilton, Forrester Research moved the office to Merritt 7 in the summer of 2020.
Last spring, Wilton vaulted Danbury for the highest vacancy rate of sub-markets in Fairfield County, at about 50 percent as calculated by Cushman & Wakefield of Connecticut.
Bridgewater Associates accounted for a substantial portion of that bump after the hedge fund moved its Wilton Woods office to Westport, according to Wilton First Selectwoman Lynne Vanderslice.
Vanderslice said she anticipates some office complexes being converted to residential uses, whether for apartments or older adult living communities.
“In our plan of conservation and development, we were encouraging different kinds of housing, because we’ve got a lot of single-family,” Vanderslice said. “We have big blocks — I don’t think that’s all going to stay offices.”
Wilton’s largest employer is ASML, which has spent the past several years expanding and modernizing its semiconductor manufacturing equipment plant that employs more than 2,000 people. And more than four years after acquiring Blue Buffalo for $8 billion, General Mills has maintained the pet food maker’s Wilton headquarters in the same River Road complex where Toluna has been located.
Toluna offers vouchers and other rewards to people who take short surveys on how they feel about a particular product or service, providing those companies with better insights to improve marketing or the product itself.
Incorporated by Andy Greenfield in 1995 as Greenfield Online, the company was an early pioneer in online survey “panels.” Greenfield Online went public a decade later, then drew a $486 million buyout from Microsoft in 2008.
Microsoft kept a European ecommerce unit called Ciao that Greenfield had acquired, and sold the remaining survey business in 2009 to Paris-based Toluna, which paid $40 million. The following year, Toluna renewed a Greenfield lease for 21,000 square feet at 21 River Road.
In choosing its new Connecticut office, Toluna opted for Merritt 7 Corporate Park that is home to several headquarters offices, including those for Xerox, Datto, Emcor, the Financial Accounting Foundation, Frontier Communications, Hearst Connecticut Media, and the craft soda maker Reed’s. JLL and CBRE provided brokerage advisory services in the deal.
Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Merritt 7 lost its biggest tenant after FactSet moved across the tracks of Metro North to The Towers complex.
But Merritt 7 has since gotten a boost, after the state Department of Transportation under Gov. Ned Lamont pushed ahead with a new rail station that is now under construction, despite initial doubts about tax revenue and commuting patterns that the pandemic created in the early going.
The station will include an overhead footbridge to the Merritt 7 complex, which has long run shuttles to provide easier access to trains on the Danbury Line.
Hearst Connecticut Media Group has office space in the Merritt 7 complex.
Includes prior reporting by Emily Morgan and Paul Schott.