By Carl Cronan
Condominiums were once thought to be the great transformer of the Tampa Bay area’s urban cores, even to the
point where Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio told National Football League executives they might not recognize the skyline when
the Super Bowl returns next year.
Those changes have materialized somewhat, with several new
condo towers rising in the Tampa and St. Petersburg central business districts, adding hundreds of luxury residences where few
existed before. Similar projects that were supposed to be under
way by now have been scrapped entirely, postponed indefinitely
or tied up in court—the latter being the case with the 52-story
Trump Tower Tampa project touted by the Donald himself as the
tallest structure along Florida’s Gulf Coast.
But while the condo craze has created a distraction within the
commercial real estate industry over the past few years, other
developers are looking to future projects that don’t even include
a multifamily component. The largest example thus far is Prime
Meridian Center, a 450,000-sf Downtown Tampa office building
set to open two years from now. While the 20-story project won’t
be the city’s tallest, it promises larger floor plates and more parking availability than any of the Bay area’s existing urban office
towers. It will also be the first class A urban multi-tenant structure in the Tampa CBD in nearly 20 years.
“We have many attributes that we think will differentiate us from
the rest of the market,” says Bob Abberger, the Tampa-based senior VP of Florida development services with CB Richard Ellis affiliate Trammell Crow Co. He promises much from the new building
beyond its targeted January 2010 opening, including an environmentally sustainable structure that he anticipates will attract larger
corporate users whose CEOs talk a good game about going green.
Prime Meridian Center, which will sport green-tinted exterior
glass, originally sought LEED Silver certification from the US
Green Building Council when the project was announced last
summer. Somewhere along the way, as Trammell Crow and
CBRE collaborated with Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum and
the Beck Group on its design, they decided to step it up a notch
and seek Gold certification instead.
“As the design advanced, we decided that we want to make a
clear statement to the market,” Abberger explains. That statement
goes beyond large-scale green design, he says, to a greatly improved office tower that allows for easier expansion of current full-floor tenants, particularly financial service providers and law firms.
Local observers view Prime Meridian Center as a gutsy project, especially considering Downtown Tampa office rents have
barely notched higher than $20 per sf for much of the past
decade, stymieing several other proposed towers.
“It’s an aggressive play,” says Russ Sampson, executive VP
with Colliers Arnold’s Tampa office. “Unless Abberger has a
Downtown Tampa’s skyline is largely unchanged since the early 1990s, though some condo and hotel elements have been added over the past few years.
Photo: Tampa Bay & Co.
