July 28, 2016

Boyle Plans $20M Office; Building Will Have Six Stories

The Commercial Appeal

By Tom Bailey

Memphis developer Boyle Investment Co. filed documents Tuesday showing plans for a $20.1 million building in an East Memphis area that draws the most demand for office space in the region.  Representatives for Boyle could not be reached Tuesday evening, but its application for a building permit shows plans for construction at 949 S. Shady Grove, at the southwest corner of Shady Grove and Briarcrest.  The project off Poplar east of the Ridge Lake office complex would be the first major development in recent years for an area of the city where vacancy rates have fallen.

The description of the work states:  “Excavation & earthwork for structural foundations.  Construction of building foundations. Underground utilities inside perimeter of building.”

Linkous Construction is the contractor for the project, and Hnedak Bobo Group is the architect.

The site is the latest phase of Boyle’s Ridgeway Center East Planned Development.

The Office of Planning & Development re-recorded the plat late last week, but the change had not appeared yet on the Shelby County Register’s website.  A change from the original plan is the building’s height.  “The new plan shows a six-story building instead of seven stories,” Planning Director Josh Whitehead said in an email response to questions from the newspaper.

According to the earlier plat, the project involves 7.3 acres and 539 total parking spaces, 82 in a garage and 457 surface lot spaces.  The building was to be 161,700 square feet in the earlier plat.

The corner lot is about a block north of Poplar, and across Shady Grove from FedEx Corp. corporate offices.

The latest office vacancy rate across the Memphis metro area is 19.2 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefield Commercial Advisors.  However, the vacancy rate is only 3.4 percent where Boyle plans its new building in the East Memphis Class A submarket.

That same area that had 411,000 square feet of available space two years ago had under 100,000 square feet of available space in the first quarter of this year, the report states.

The survey also shows that the East Memphis office submarket had only two spaces that could accommodate a user needing more than 10,000 square feet.