DENTAL-ISM

by Bert Stratton

I perused Dental Economics magazine. I owned a medical office building in Solon, Ohio. Did you know it costs about $350/square foot to build-out a dental office. There’s all that extra plumbing involved. Either the landlord pays for the extras or the dentist does. Everything is negotiable.

My building had five dental offices, three doctors’ offices, a chiropractor, a masseuse, and a trucker. The trucker was because it was getting hard to find independent medical practitioners.

I had a lunch date with a dentist-tenant. A young real estate apprentice tagged along with me, to Corky & Lenny’s. He said to the dentist, “A DDS is a license to print money.”

Apprentice, be quiet. We don’t want the dentist to know we know he’s loaded.

The dentist pondered the idea of expanding his office; he had three dental chairs and was thinking about a fourth. And he had some complaints. When I had first met him, he had said, “I’m going to be your biggest pain in the ass.” Correct.

At Corky & Lenny’s, the dentist said the lettering on the medical building’s office-directory sign board in the lobby wasn’t uniform. Some dentists and docs had bigger lettering than he did. “It doesn’t look professional,” the dentist said.

The apprentice had inadvertently bought different-sized lettering. “It was our error,” I said. “The letters are supposed to be the same size.”

The apprentice said, “You know it’s very hard to communicate with sign companies.”

“No, I wouldn’t know about that,” the dentist said.

Onward: the artwork in the lobby. Bad. We had hung pastoral oil paintings by the renowned painter/musician Irwin Weinberger. The Cleveland Clinic had calming artwork; why not my building? The dentist said, “You put up paintings in the lobby, but you can’t afford to paint my walls?”

I sold the medical building two years later. A commercial real estate broker told me, too late: “Docs and dentists all think they’re God.”