Thank You Tom Wallin and 2016 Highlights

Thank you, Tom Wallin!

Thank you, Tom Wallin, for your service and the effort and volunteer leadership you gave to help BOMA succeed in its mission to help all of us, our owners and our companies!

Tom served the last 18 months as BOMA's Chair and in that time he:

1. Led over 20 Board and Executive Committee meetings
2. Presided at 13 General Lunch Meetings as well as several special networking events
3. He traveled to the BOMA International national meetings in Washington D.C. twice and Los Angeles and regionally to other meetings just so that he could work hard going to countless other meetings in support of BOMA’s efforts to bring value to our members.
4. As BOMA Chairman, Tom was an unofficial member of every BOMA committee and as such, he supported the many BOMA committee Chairs.
5. But much more than cross the floating bridge a zillion times and participate and lead many BOMA events – Tom skillfully steered the course of the good ship BOMA as we grew our membership and ensured our capital resources were well deployed.
6. Tom also taught BOMA education courses – to the benefit of the many early career real estate professionals in his classes.
7. He even taught a room full of BOMA Executive Colleagues in D.C. how to better understand the language of our industry – explaining and demonstrating what the "Cap Rate" is all about and what it signifies to managers and owners.
8. Tom "visioned” and championed a better, more useful and very successful BOMA website.
9. Tom stayed abreast of a great many advocacy and regulatory issues - ensuring lawmakers were hearing our concerns.  Tom lobbied for us face to face with our federal elected officials in D.C. as well as in Olympia (and he was really very good at educating them on a wide range of issues).
10. Tom has been a great leader and mentor – and BOMA is better because of his commitment to our organization and all of us.

Thank you, Tom, for all your efforts, leadership and support!

2016 Highlights

2016 was a successful year for BOMA. We accomplished many goals that were set for Advocacy, Networking and Education. Below are some of the highlights. 

Advocacy - Olympia

• Meetings on BOMA issues with more than 75 state lawmakers in 2016
• Successfully opposed efforts to impose sales tax on janitorial services
• Successfully opposed efforts to impose a 30,000 SF limit on janitorial cleaning in an 8 hour shift – would have increased costs by 40% or 30 cents/SF
• Joined Coalition to successfully defeat a state Capital Gains Tax
• Laid the groundwork to introduce a bill next year that if passed, would prohibit commercial rent control in Washington State

 Advocacy - Local

• BOMA joined a coalition and contributed funds to successfully prevent the imposition of as much as $28/SF in workforce housing linkage fees on new development
• BOMA worked diligently and successfully - so far - to oppose a proposal to impose a form of commercial rent control in Seattle
• BOMA leaders very actively participated representing member interests in shaping the rules that will govern the new mandatory Building Tune-up regulations in Seattle – providing owners with more options (on-going)
• BOMA leaders have advocated our interest in developing homeless encampment legislation
• BOMA engaged on several affordable housing issues in Seattle and Bellevue representing commercial real estate interest
• BOMA Leadership carefully considered and supported Sound Transit 3 and formed a Transportation Task Force that engaged several other mobility projects

BOMA PAC of Washington

• Raised funds for the BOMA PAC
• BOMA PAC supported 32 candidates who understand our industry’s issues and 28 won their elections  

Networking
BOMA organized over 50 events, meetings and education sessions in 2016 with combined attendance and participation of 4,000.

These events included:

• Ski Day
• Baseball & a Brew
• Sounders Networking Day
• Four Mentor Events
• Several networking events for Emerging Professionals
• General Lunch Meetings
• BOMA Golf
  292 Golfers and 50 Venue Sponsors - the most ever (and this year we finally had a $10,000 hole-in-one Winner!)
  
• Oktoberfest Trade Show - most successful event to date with over 60 exhibitors and sponsors and 250 real estate professionals in attendance
• BOMA Holiday Party at the Space Needle

Communications

• BOMA’s new website averaged over 15,000 hits/month
• Over one hundred reference documents and more added weekly
• Streamlined registrations and receipt processing

Education

• 18 different education offerings
• 108 classroom hours
• Over 400 Registrations
• We conducted 2 BOMI Courses & the Foundations of Real Estate Management Course
• We also held several seminars. Power Hours and Engineer Skills training hours
• We added several past lunch and learn videos to the website
• And we posted many articles from e-news and other member contributors on our website