First look: 48-story tower to proceed next to Republic Square
After nearly 5 years of planning, groundbreaking expected in Q2 '22 for The Republic
By Paul Thompson – Assistant Managing Editor, Austin Business Journal
Apr 20, 2022 Updated Apr 20, 2022, 8:08am CDT
Another office tower is set to rise in downtown Austin, with an equity partner and an undisclosed tenant on board.
After years of planning, developers plan to break ground this quarter on The Republic. Lincoln Property Co. and Phoenix Property Co. are co-developers, while an April 20 announcement said Divco West Real Estate Services LLC, aka DivcoWest, is on board as equity partner. The building is set to rise 48 stories and total 833,000 square feet at 401 W. Fourth St., currently home to a surface parking lot just south of Republic Square. Floor plates are expected to average 29,000 square feet.
The "major tenant" was not identified although the announcement suggested The Republic “is prime for new corporate headquarters or companies looking to expand into the Austin market.”
"Everybody has seen the stats and the number of corporate relocations," said Seth Johnston, senior vice president at Lincoln Property. "I would just tell you that it’s going to be a mixed bag of [companies] existing in Austin currently, and relocation from outside of the state and outside the city."
Johnston declined to offer any further details "out of respect for the tenant's privacy."
The project is another sign of the continued thirst for downtown office space as companies contemplate return-to-office plans. Demand for office space in Austin resulted in a record high average asking rental rate for new, class A space during the first quarter of 2022, according to a recent report from CBRE Group Inc. At the end of December, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. leased the entire commercial half of the 66-story Sixth and Guadalupe tower — which Lincoln is developing alongside Kairoi Residential LLC and DivcoWest.
The building will feature 750-square-foot private terraces on every office floor, according to the announcement. A 50,000-square-foot amenity level on the 19th floor will feature a club room with a lounge and a bar, conference rooms, a fitness center and a sky terrace that overlooks Republic Square. The building's design is by Duda Paine, the North Carolina-based architecture firm that also designed the Frost Bank Tower.
Another planned amenity is a 20,000-square-foot public plaza at ground level, . The development team opted to include the plaza rather than build all the way out to the property line along Fourth Street, fronting Republic Square Park.
"The city and the county and the taxpayers paid a lot of money to redo that park, and it’s a huge attribute in the center of downtown to have true green space like that," Johnston said. "We made a conscious decision to pull the envelope of the building back 60 feet, by the whole width of the block, to create that."
The building with also feature touchless access and a private elevator for those who bike to work. The tower will have storage space for up to 350 bicycles, along with “a spa-quality locker room and showers,” according to the announcement. The Republic will have roughly 1,900 parking spots, Johnston said.
Harvey-Cleary Builders is the general contractor, HKS is the architect of record and the sustainability consultant, TBG Partners is the landscape architect, WGI is the civil engineer, BDD is the structural engineer and Blum Engineering is the mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineer.
The project has been nearly five years in the making: Lincoln and Phoenix acquired a 99-year ground lease for the site in July 2017. The deal was worth $430 million in lease payments, ABJ reported at the time. Travis County bought the land in 2010 for $21.8 million.
In 2018, the building was conceived as a 37-story, 711,401-square-foot office tower.
Before Lincoln and Phoenix acquired the ground lease, a replacement for Travis County's aging Heman Marion Sweatt Courthouse was pegged for the site, though voters shot down that proposal in 2015. Instead, a 443,000-square-foot courthouse is rising at 1700 Guadalupe St.
Lincoln and Phoenix are both based in Dallas. The former has been extremely active on Austin's downtown development scene. Just two blocks north of Republic Square, Sixth and Guadalupe will soon be the tallest building in Austin. It is slated to be completed in July 2023, Johnston said. Meanwhile, it has proposed what could be the tallest tower in Austin and the state: a 74-story super tower at 98 Red River St. It is set to follow the towers rising on the west side of downtown — Johnston said the development team has a site development permit in hand, but they’ve got “a little bit of administrative work to do there.”
Phoenix has less of a local track record, but was involved in development of the Cole apartments on South Lamar Boulevard, ABJ previously reported.
San Francisco-based DivcoWest, meanwhile, last year purchased the 170,000-square-foot Bouldin Creek office building in South Austin.
Pandemic lessons learned during construction of Sixth and Guadalupe will be incorporated into Lincoln's newest tower, including touch-less tech, automatic revolving doors and improve air filtration, Johnston said.
“We learned a lot through that process at Sixth and Guadalupe that we were able to bring over to The Republic,” he said.
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