United Rentals has left its Greenwich, Conn., headquarters and moved to a new 47,000-square-foot office in nearby Stamford. The new office has twice the space of the previous headquarters and is more conveniently located, a block away from a train station on the New York-Boston train corridor as well as numerous hotels and restaurants.
The new facility also gives United the opportunity to move its IT staff, which previously had been in a separate facility, into a shared office space.
“It’s a very nice building in a nice campus setting,” Bill Plummer, United Rentals executive vice president and chief financial officer told RER. “There’s a Hilton Hotel right there, restaurants, a café in the building, and a lot of other amenities in and nearby the building that make it very appealing.”
United Rentals hired a group of architects and designers it had worked with on some of its facilities to design the offices and build it out according to its needs. “It’s very bright, and from the moment you walk in it feels like a great place to work, from the design and the brightness and the sense of the company’s vision and values,” Craig Pintoff, senior vice president of human resources told RER. “We had some interviews already and got some wonderful feedback from the candidates. And being on the train line it opens up the opportunities for folks who want to commute from New York City, it’s not a difficult commute. So any time you can expand your talent pool, in my world, that’s a great plus.”
As well as attracting talent from New York, Plummer and Pintoff added that quite a few United Rentals employees come from areas north of Stamford and the commute south is heavily trafficked. Now the train will facilitate commuting for many of those people.
The new headquarters also includes a state-of-the-art training facility for leadership development training and other types of training programs. “It’s wonderful because when they come to headquarters, they get exposed to our leadership team and it’s very engaging for our people,” added Plummer. “We’re going to use that training space a lot.”
The office also has a lot of conference rooms with new video conferencing capabilities.
“It’s really going to help us reach out to the regions and other folks around the company in ways that we couldn’t in the old location,” said Pintoff.
United Rentals, now based in Stamford, Conn., is the largest company in the North American equipment rental industry, No. 1 on the RER 100.
