A question sometimes may be answered with a “yes” or a “no.”
When the question is whether a new parking garage is needed Downtown, the answer is “it depends” and “it could be a good idea.”
That’s the reaction from people who find tenants to lease office space in the urban core and the opinion of a parking consultant who works with companies that are moving Downtown.
Southeast Development Group is proposing construction of a 551-space parking structure at 28 W. Adams St., the current location of a surface parking lot owned and operated by the city.
Southeast would use about half of the spaces for tenants at the former Barnett Bank building and would offer the rest for long- and short-term parking.
Southeast retained Atlanta-based management company Parksimple to survey the level of interest in the garage project.
According to Parksimple Vice President of Sales Robert Day, based on the response to the survey, there is “a lot of interest” in having more parking options for Downtown tenants.
That’s not a surprise to Bob Retherford, senior leasing director at Cushman & Wakefield.
“You need to have convenient and secure parking to lease office space Downtown,” Retherford said, adding it’s a topic that always comes up during lease negotiations.
“It’s very important to critical” for potential tenants, he added.
Oliver Barakat, senior vice president and broker at CBRE, agreed. He’s also a member of the Downtown Investment Authority board of directors.
“For office requirements, parking is one of the top-three criteria, he said.
Barakat said not only does a Downtown tenant want enough spaces to lease, they have to be in the right location.
“Typically, there is a ‘diameter of desirability.’ Closer is better,” he said.
Retherford agreed, saying, “People don’t want to walk three or four blocks to their car.”
Parking consultant Mark Rimmer is president of Realistic Transportation Alternatives Inc.
He has worked with clients including EverBank, which moved more than 1,700 executives and staff from suburban office space to the former AT&T Tower on West Bay Street, now EverBank Center.
While the total number of parking spaces within Downtown is probably sufficient to meet demand, proximity is more important.
“It’s impossible to build enough parking at everyone’s front door. There are pockets where it’s pretty full and other pockets where it’s not,” said Rimmer.
He worked with EverBank and building management to develop a parking strategy that included spaces in urban core garages and surface lots, as well as spaces in peripheral lots such as the Kings Avenue garage on the Southbank.
EverBank employees who park there ride the Skyway across the river to and from where their vehicles are parked.
The company also has employees assigned to different shifts. Rimmer said that made it possible in some cases for two employees to essentially “share” one leased parking space, since only one employee would be at work at a given time.
“There’s a different solution for every situation. Everyone at the same company doesn’t have the same parking needs,” said Rimmer.
Having more parking options could be an advantage for commercial real estate brokers, Barakat said, based on recent trends in urban office space needs.
Companies are designing office floor plans with more employees per square foot of space than was the norm several years ago.
“There used to be about one employee per 250 square feet. Now it’s more like one employee for every 100 or 150 square feet,” he said.
Based on that trend, “we can always use more parking,” Barakat said.
Adding garage spaces at Forsyth and Main could make parking more convenient for tenants and it could address Downtown’s future needs.
“Right now, there’s parking available,” Rimmer said. “But there’s also a lot of office space available for lease.”
According to a report published by CBRE, by the end of 2015, Downtown office space vacancy fell to 17.7 percent of the about 7 million square feet in the urban core.
It’s the lowest in five years, but leaves nearly 1.5 million square feet waiting for tenants.
Rimmer said Downtown studies conducted in the past 10 years identified the need for a comprehensive study of parking inventory, but that has not yet been done.
“It’s not just the demand, it’s where is the demand and when is the demand. It’s whether parking availability meets the needs of tenants. We need to have a comprehensive study,” he said.
@DRMaxDowntown
(904) 356-2466