Site unseen: filling space in Charlotte that isn’t built yet

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Imagine signing a lease for offices in a building at the same time you have to imagine both the offices and the building.

That’s what’s happening in uptown Charlotte, where Portman Holdings, a worldwide development and architecture firm based in Atlanta, is planning a large office tower on Stonewall Street, on top of the existing parking deck at The Westin, which Portman also owns.

Trinity Partners, of Charlotte, has signed on as the leasing agent responsible for filling that space, at the intersection of College and Stonewall streets.

But construction hasn’t started on the office tower, and won’t until the building is about 50 percent leased, said Travis Garland, leasing manager with Portman. Even the renderings are still more than a month away.

So, as Trinity and Portman begin seeking to fill the building, they are hoping to sign up tenants sold on amenities and potential, because the building now exists only in the minds of the development team.

“When talking with (prospective) tenants, we’re going to have to make it feel as real as possible,” Garland said. “Tenants like to touch and feel a building before they commit, so our challenge is to make that building seem real.”

To make the building come alive even before the first beam is installed, Garland said Portman and Trinity will provide potential lessees with “renderings, drawings, models and computer models” to ensure the companies will know all of the spaces’ characteristics.

John Ball, a Trinity Partners’ senior leasing agent primarily responsible for leasing at the Portman tower, along with his colleague Peter Conway, said he also is hoping to sell potential tenants on many of the features of the building that he says are unmatched in the uptown office market.

On top of Ball’s list of features is access. He said that two aspects of the tower will give tenants superior access compared with other uptown office towers.

The first is that attached to the building will be the Stonewall light rail station, the first uptown stop coming from the south.

The other is parking. The Portman tower will be able to offer two dedicated parking spots in The Westin deck per 1,000 square feet of leased space. Most other office towers are able to offer only one dedicated spot per 1,000 feet of space, Ball said.

Garland said there are 1,600 parking spaces in The Westin deck. During the construction some of those spaces will be lost, he said, but enough spots will remain for the office building, the hotel and the Charlotte Convention Center, which is across Stonewall Street from the hotel and future building.

For now, though, the features of the building are just about all Ball can discuss. Portman architects are still finalizing the design, and even the size of the building remains up in the air, Garland said. The belief is that it will be 15 stories, but Garland said it’s possible a 14-story design could prevail. If the 14-story building is preferred, the square footage would drop from about 350,000 to around 325,000, as the building will have 23,000-square-foot floor plates.

Both Ball and Garland said the building’s full marketing package, including renderings, models and specific building details, will be ready in 30 to 60 days. Once those materials are ready, the hunt for tenants begins.

But construction can’t move forward until enough tenants are rounded up to fill half of the space.

To secure financing for the building, Garland said, lenders in this economy usually require that a developer has significant commitments from tenants. And 50 percent seems to be the number lenders like, he said.

“If we were to land a corporate relocation from a good-credit company with 40 percent (commitment), that might be enough,” Garland said. “But before we have anyone lined up, we’re going to shoot for 50 (percent).”

Once the financing is secured and Portman begins to go vertical with the office building, Garland said, the company estimates it will take between 16 and 20 months to finish the tower, which he said is a much shorter time than if the project required starting from scratch.

Because the tower is to be built on top of the existing parking deck at The Westin, Ball said, there is little-to-no prep work involved.

“We’re shovel-ready over there,” he said.

Garland said not having to do much site work probably will save Portman six to 12 months on the construction timeline.

And Ross Howard, an office-market analyst in the Charlotte office of Jones Lang LaSalle, said it will be important for that building to go up sooner rather than later because of a lack of large tracts of currently available office space in the uptown submarket.

Howard said there are only four large, contiguous Class A office spaces available uptown and only one of those, the Fifth Third Center, covers more than 100,000 square feet. 525 North Tryon has just more than 92,000 square feet available, 200 South Tryon has 76,800 square feet and 101 Independence Center has 72,400 square feet.

With only those spaces available uptown, Howard said, another space is needed if Charlotte is to draw another high-profile corporation to the center city.

“We’re talking about a lack of a large, premier space,” he said. “The Central Business District is the hub of the city, so there will always be the demand there.”

According to the Jones Lang LaSalle first quarter report on the city office market, there is a 6.5 percent vacancy rate in the Downtown office market, but not a single square foot of office construction.

Howard said adding another large, contiguous space uptown would make sense in the current market, which is exactly what Garland and Portman are banking on.

“One of our key drivers has been looking at the lack of that large space,” Garland said. “If you have a corporation looking to come from out of the area or another large company looking to let its lease expire, they don’t have options.”

GUION can be reached at [email protected], (704) 817-1344 or on Twitter at @paytonguion.