Research Triangle Park’s ambitious Hub RTP project will add more life-science lab space
Longfellow Real Estate Partners, a life-sciences-focused real estate firm that has been active in the Triangle over the past decade, said Wednesday that it will develop more than 200,000 square feet of lab and office space in Research Triangle Park’s ambitious Hub RTP project.
Longfellow, which is based in Boston, has built several projects in the Triangle, most notably the Innovation District buildings in downtown Durham, which will soon be home to Google’s new Durham office, and several lab buildings in and around Research Triangle Park. In total, the company now operates more than four million square feet of space in the region.
The 220,000-square-foot commitment to Hub RTP will give Longfellow a sizeable chunk of one of the Triangle’s largest ongoing construction projects.
Hub RTP will be “a central hub for all of RTP,” Longfellow Partner Jessica Brock said in an interview. “With the allowance of mixed use there, you can have retail, office, lab, multifamily all in a central location, which ... I think is pretty exciting, not just for the park, but for the entire region.”
Longfellow’s contribution to Hub RTP will be built on a 1.5-acre parcel of the 100-acre project. The building is expected to be eight stories tall, and Longfellow hopes to break ground on it in 2023.
The Hub RTP project — originally known as Park Center — has been in the works since 2015, when Durham County pledged money toward the project in hopes that it would reinvigorate Research Triangle Park.
The property is near the intersection of N.C. 54 and Davis Drive, and the two-million-square-foot collection of office towers would be visible from nearby Interstate 40.
Construction on Hub RTP began last year. The project is viewed as a necessary attempt to bring an urban-like town center to the center of RTP, which has been an economic catalyst for the region for more than half a century.
But since the world-famous business park was built, as a collection of hidden corporate offices, trends have moved toward more dense construction that include apartments, restaurants and retail.
In addition to office space, Hub RTP includes the already built Frontier co-working campus, home to more than 100 startups, and the Boxyard, a newly opened food-and-retail center.
“Our job is to create an environment that will attract companies to North Carolina,” Scott Levitan, the CEO of the Research Triangle Foundation, told The News & Observer in the past. “We heard loud and clear that companies are focused on having a mixed-use, town-center environment that is active and will help them recruit talent.”
RTP, and much of the rest of the Triangle, has seen significant momentum in the number of businesses moving to the region in the past 12 months.
Since the beginning of COVID last March, $4.5 billion of investment has been announced inside RTP, Levitan said in an interview earlier this year. That’s accounted for about 5,000 planned jobs.
The most notable win for RTP has been Apple, which announced in April it would place an East Coast campus and 3,000 jobs in the Park after receiving state incentives worth $845.8 million.
But the life-science industry, in which Longfellow operates, has also been steadily adding jobs in and around RTP. Biogen, Fujifilm Diosynth, ApiJect and several other biotech companies have announced expansions in the region over the past 12 months.
“We’ve seen demand increasing over the past 18 months, and if we look at the pipeline that we have going forward there just continues to be more and more companies either moving to North Carolina or expanding in North Carolina,” Brock said. “It’s making us more of a central hub for the life sciences, which we’ve always been, right, but we are maturing kind of to that next level.”
Longfellow is the second developer to make a commitment to build in Hub RTP. The first and largest came from the Dallas developer KDC.
KDC, which built Credit Suisse’s offices in RTP, plans to contribute up to one million square feet of office space to Hub RTP in the coming years, The N&O previous reported.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published August 25, 2021 at 10:31 AM.
