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V O L . X X I X N O. X V I J U LY 2 4 , 2 0 2 3 16 R E A L E S TAT E / C O N S T R U C T I O N / E N G I N E E R I N G A textbook printer without a loading dock for big trucks to back into? Not a problem for BW Walch at 35 Foden Road in South Portland. Last December, the company moved into the 9,000-square-foot former WEX Inc. call center. Forced out of its former leased space in Portland, BW Walch was in a hurry to find a mixed-use facil- ity in a tight market. e unexpected find came with climate control to keep humidity low for paper, the most important attribute for its business. "Otherwise, all those books would be curling," CEO and Chairman Al Noyes says as he dashes past printing machines and stacks of math and science textbooks ready to ship to school districts in Georgia, California and other places. "We could have looked for loading docks, but then climate control would have been an issue." Once that problem was solved, the company impro- vised a loading dock by punching a hole in the wall and installing an overhead door that trucks pull up to after backing in, and added an interior wall to separate offices from manufacturing. e loading set-up differs from the previous one, where vehicles could easily back in and load and unload on a level platform. "Here, it's less convenient, but we make do," says Noyes. e 19-employee company also gets by without a warehouse, using Volk Paxit in Sanford as a fullment center. "We used to do it ourselves at the old place but given the urgent need to move and the configuration of the new place, Volk was a great option." Such is the new reality of commercial real estate as evolving work habits play out on the property market, sparking a growing number of conversions of under- or unused offices into other kinds of properties from light industrial to residential and educational. at's making life more interesting for brokers like Justin Lamontagne of the Dunham Group. He directed BW Walch to the Foden Road "office" listing a couple years after putting Mainely Urns into lower-level office space at 60 Pineland Drive in New Gloucester. "Office demand was slow at that time, thus the pivot to alternative uses," Lamontagne says. "It's fun for us, and to some extent it gets the creative juices flowing." Global work shift Around the globe, the spike in remote and hybrid work during the pandemic has cut into demand for office space. P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Al Noyes, CEO and chairman of BW Walch, says the printing company's climate-controlled space in a former WEX call center in South Portland is ideal for paper. F O C U S With less people returning to the office, landlords have been rethinking and repurposing vacant space. — Jasmin A. Moulton Legacy Properties Sotheby's International Realty INNER SPACE Converting vacant offices for other uses gains traction in Maine B y R e n e e C o r d e s

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