Glenwood Place office park tenant reacts to demolition plans

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Steve Wilson

Gordon Grubb, founder of the Grubb Ventures real estate development firm in Raleigh.

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Amanda Jones Hoyle

Staff Writer- Triangle Business Journal

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For more than 40 years, the Glenwood Place office park in Raleigh has been home to hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses needing – or wanting – easy travel access to Raleigh's I-440 Beltline.

Today, the park rents space to about 115 local companies ranging from corporate offices for Frankel Staffing Partners to nonprofit organizations like the Alzeimers Association-Eastern North Carolina.

Most, if not all, of those businesses will over the next few months and few years have to start thinking about a new long-term plan if Glenwood Place owner Gordon Grubb with Grubb Ventures follows through with his plan to completely redevelop the site under a new partnership with Charlotte-based Lincoln Harris.

Rhody Dillon, president of Dillon Commercial Real Estate Services, says he moved into the Caswell Building at Glenwood Place about five years ago. He plans to stay until his landlord runs him out.

"As long as the BB&Y restaurant is in this building, I'm staying," Dillon says.

But BB&Y, and many of the other tenants in the Caswell Building, aren't being given the option to sign new long-term leases of five years or more.

"We didn't want to commit to a lease that long because we hope to demolish that building by then," says Grubb. "The buildings here have really outlived their useful life, and they really are getting expensive to maintain."

Glenwood Place still has eight office buildings encompassing about 250,000 square feet total, and the buildings were 79 percent occupied in the third quarter, according to Triangle Business Journal research.

That occupancy number takes into account also the empty space in the half-vacant Alleghany Building that's been slated for demolition for a couple of years and is currently off the market for lease.

Amanda Jones Hoyle covers commercial and residential real estate. Follow her on Twitter @TBJrealestate