durham inc.
ANNOUNCEMENTS BY BIG TECH COMPANIES COULD ACCELERATE GROWTH IN DURHAM REAL ESTATE BY BRANDEE GRUENER mos Cooper Jr. would like to stop operating his concierge service, Bull City Butler, out of the guest bedroom in his home. He is looking to buy commercial property that is large enough that he can hire a couple of people, expand his business and possibly rent to a retail tenant. Travel plans and corporate events dried up during the pandemic, and the slowdown in business gave him time to think about the importance of diversifying his income. Cooper began talking with Partners in Equity, an investment group “committed to increasing the number of Black- and brown-owned businesses that own the real estate where their companies operate.” He discovered that buying a commercial property was more attainable than he’d thought. And with companies like Google, Apple and a number of life sciences companies announcing they will add thousands of employees to the area, now seemed like the moment. “There’s going to be a huge influx of people over the next few years who are going to be moving to this area, and they are looking for things to do, places to go,” Cooper said. “It’s a good time to get in now if you’re going to do it.” And while commercial real estate looks nothing like the insanely hot residential real estate market in Durham, that dynamic could change.
Google Cloud announced in March that it’s establishing an engineering site in Durham. It will initially sublease space in downtown under an agreement with Duke University and is evaluating several locations for its permanent home.
“At some point, you know, in the next two years, I have a feeling that things are going to be pricing out a whole lot of people very quickly,” he said.
BUSINESSES WONDER HOW GOOGLE MOVE WILL AFFECT DOWNTOWN
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ooper is looking in and around downtown, where rents have sprung up alongside new buildings and redevelopments. That’s why he decided ownership would be the more economical approach to moving into an office. One of his neighbors would be Google, which announced plans in March to open a new cloud engineering hub in Durham.ID. It could take up to two years to build out the space at 200 Morris St., but the company expects to hire 150 employees
by the end of the year. The cloud engineering hub is projected to have 500 employees by 2023 and could eventually reach 1,000. Alva Horton is the community manager of Locale 321, which rents 19 private offices on East Chapel Hill Street to remote workers and others who need an office outside of their homes. Horton expects that demand for coworking spaces will increase as Google employees and their spouses move to the area. Demand already went up because of the challenges of buying a new home with adequate home office space during the pandemic. But while Horton said they have talked about expanding Locale 321 in the past, it would have to be “the right sort of space” to fit their Durhamcentric coworking community. Horton’s own marketing
company, The Assemblage Studio, is one of the tenants. “We don’t want to grow so big that we lose that,” she said. “It’s really important to us that it is that community space.” Horton said she doesn’t worry about the availability of commercial real estate right now, but she would like to see downtown preserve its character and its homegrown businesses. “I love those local spaces so much,” she said. “I would be concerned that there would be some larger corporate retail and restaurants that would come in, that would buy up those spaces. I’d like to see more local businesses do that.” When asked about the potential impact of Google’s arrival on small business owners, Lilyn Hester, head of external affairs for the Southeast, provided a list of Google’s
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