Duke filling up space

Duke University continues to seep into downtown Durham. This time, at least 200 more university employees are center-city bound.

Duke inked a deal to move employees from its regional affairs and development offices -- fundraisers, not construction people -- to West Village, the mixed-use project that has risen from the bones of old Liggett & Myers Tobacco warehouses.

The university agreed to lease about 50,000 square feet in the recently expanded phase of West Village, which straddles Main Street, just east of Duke Street.

The deals include almost 35,000 square feet in the Cobb and O'Brien warehouses and all of a 15,540-square-foot Main Street office building. It will be a consolidation and expansion of offices from on and off campus, said Scott Selig, Duke's associate vice president of capital assets.

Duke has been growing off campus during the past several years. It now leases roughly 600,000 square feet of downtown offices.

That makes Duke the biggest office tenant in downtown, and perhaps the entire county, says Ted Conner, vice president of economic development at the greater Durham Chamber of Commerce.

That kind of presence gives developers and city leaders a little comfort in the prospects of downtown Durham's renaissance. Institutional jobs tend to be more stable than private sector ones.

And when it comes to jobs in downtown Durham, Duke has been in a giving mood this year.

In January, Duke agreed to move 300 Duke Clinical Research Institute employees to 72,000 square feet at Durham Centre, the 14-story, reflective blue office building on the northern edge of the Downtown Loop.

In April, Duke University School of Medicine leased a 32,000-square-foot Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina building at 800 S. Duke St., where it will expand its physician assistant program.

Duke plans to sublease about 12,000 square feet at the N.C. Mutual Life Insurance building at 411 W. Chapel Hill St.

More deals are in the works. At the moment, Duke is scoping out downtown labs.

That Duke landed at West Village isn't a big surprise.

After all, two of the project's partners are pretty notable Duke grads: basketball stars Christian Laettner and Brian Davis.

What seems surprising to some is how quickly the expanded West Village is filling up.

Duke joins a couple of smaller tenants, leaving all but 5 percent of the office leased, says Brad Corsmeier, the Colliers Pinkard broker representing West Village in office leases.

That should help drop downtown Durham's office vacancy rate, which had bubbled to 16.1 percent at the end of June -- the highest since early 2005, according to Karnes Research, which tracks Triangle commercial real estate trends.

The influx of jobs is no doubt helping the new residences at West Village: 212 new apartments, which have been opening in phases between April and June.

Already a jaw-dropping 76 percent of the units are leased.

It typically takes a year or more for many new apartment projects to do that well.

"It sends a clear message that there's more pent-up demand for quality, loft-style apartments," says Tom Niemann, a Duke business school grad who is a partner with with Davis and Laettner in West Village. "And it's a testimony to the job growth in downtown.

"We're really at the tip of the iceberg," he adds. "I've been a big believer that since we started West Village that we could recruit several thousand people to live in and around downtown.

"It only gets better and better."