A 47-story tower in Midtown Atlanta that had been empty since 2020 got a new lease on life with the Center for Global Health and Innovation's roughly 200,000-square-foot lease last December, with the potential for attracting additional tenants for what now is named Tower Square.
The property: AT&T emptied the office building at 675 W. Peachtree St. NW in a consolidation of offices to save costs. Built in 1981, the Midtown Atlanta tower contains more than 1.4 million square feet. When AT&T left, it created a large chunk of empty office space in a part of Atlanta that has about 5.4 million square feet of empty space for a nearly 18% vacancy rate.
Why it matters: The Center for Global Health and Innovation is expected to be the first to move into the iconic Atlanta building and anchor a new innovation district of collaborative space created by health innovators for health innovators. Its goal is to provide a place for innovation in health, life sciences and medical research and a space where the public sector, private sector and community organizations can meet and collaborate. In addition to office space, Tower Square will have laboratories and meeting space.
Going deeper: Atlanta is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC Foundation, the Task Force for Global Health, and the American Cancer Society. The city also is home to Emory University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech and other University System of Georgia schools. Midtown also is a hotbed for technology startups. Tower Square neighbors Tech Square, an area of multiple blocks next to Georgia Tech, and is expected to be a national extension of the innovation area.
Brokers: Chris Port, Alex Port and Kyle Kenyon of CBRE represented the landlord, Icahn Enterprises. Clark Dean and his team at Transwestern represented the tenant.
What they're saying: “Georgia and Atlanta continue to commit and grow resources toward creating a more robust life sciences ecosystem in our state, and the District and our programs will build on that foundation by training talent, creating new jobs, enabling entrepreneurs to innovate more effectively, fostering collaboration between the public health sector and private sector, and addressing health equity issues here and around the globe," said Maria Thacker Goethe, the Center for Global Health and Innovation’s CEO, in an email to CoStar News.
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