Long Island Business News, Feb 10, 2006 by Claude Solnik

Totus Business Centers has about 100 tenants at the 105 Maxess Road and 330 South Service Road office buildings in Melville, including 45 tenants that occupy no square footage at all. That is, assuming you don’t count the space occupied by a telephone.In addition to renting conventional office space, Totus provides virtual offices, packages in which businesses pay for a phone number, answering service and a mailing address. Or any of the above.

Virtual tenants at the operation, owned by T. Weiss Realty, which also owns the buildings, get four hours of conference room use a month. The most typical package costs about $250 a month. Virtual tenants at Totus include attorneys, accountants, mortgage professionals, computer consultants, salespeople and technology and insurance companies.Some people work out of their homes, said Mercedes Freer, Totus director of operations. Some are startup companies. Others are not. Others just want a presence on Long Island and have an office somewhere else.Totus clients can have people dial into a 212 number, thinking they’re reaching Manhattan, only to be hooked up with a Totus receptionist in Melville.We believe this is the heart of the Long Island business community, said T. Weiss President Ted Weiss. To have a Melville address, if you’re dealing with Long island based companies – that carries a lot of weight.The caller has no idea where this person is and believes that person is working out of his office in one of our buildings, Weiss added.While this can provide an efficient way of doing business, it also provides a false impression that a person has a Melville office.From an ethical perspective, we should be informed of where the exact location is, where the central office is located or the home office, said Debra Fleming, dean of the Paul and Terry Townsend School of Business at Dowling College, Oakdale. That creates more credibility, trust and respect for the working relationship you have.Weiss said virtual offices simply allow companies to reach the next level.Thanks to cell phones, virtual office services such as Totus can forward calls around the globe, serving as a home base for sales people on the road.Through its Verizon’s foreign exchange service, the Totus will issue 212 or 646 numbers hooked to phones around the country.It’s not a function of getting a Manhattan number or not, said John Bonomo, a Verizon spokesman. It’s a function of people who want to appear to be operating or have a presence in one area, for whatever reason.He said companies can use an FX program to get phone numbers at locations nationwide.I don’t think the mom-and-pop grocery store would do this, Bonomo said. But possibly the 100-employee insurance company would.Still others have found additional methods of making people believe they’re dialing into Manhattan.One head hunter said he moved his office out of his Manhattan six months after 9/11, but he kept his 212 number, which he simply forwards to Long Island.Clients think I’m in the city, said the head hunter, who has shared office space available to him to meet clients in Manhattan.His mail is sent to the shared office in Manhattan, but snail mail matters less in an increasingly virtual world.I don’t get mail, he said. I get e-mail.With virtual office providers yield many benefits, there can a down side when you decide to move on.Once you’re assigned a number, you can’t take it with you, Freer said. We recycle our numbers here.