Downtown Vancouver’s Al Angelo Building has landed three new office tenants and its owners expect to use build-out incentives to fill the five-story structure within the next year.
Vancouver environmental consulting and engineering firm Maul Foster & Alongi announced this week it plans to lease 5,500 square feet on the fourth floor of the 56,400-square-foot building at 400 E. Mill Plain Blvd. About 3,000 square feet of the building’s third floor will be leased by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Northwest Tax Advisors will lease 3,000 square feet on the building’s second floor. All three are moving from other locations in Vancouver.
“We’ve been wanting to get closer to the services downtown,” said Alistaire Clary, operations director with Maul Foster & Alongi.
She said the move also represents an expansion for the company, which employs a staff of about 60 people. That’s up from 50 employees last year.
“Now we’re at the point where we need to move to keep up with our growth as well,” Clary said. Her company is planning a September move to its new downtown space.
So far, major new tenants in the Al Angelo Building are vacating other offices, producing few gains for the area’s overall office occupancy rate. However, office-retail specialist Brett Irons said the building has generated a few inquiries from Portland-based firms, including a software engineering group considering about 7,000 square feet.
“It indicates a little bit more confidence in the market,” said Irons, a broker with Coldwell Banker Commercial in Vancouver.
He said the building’s owners extended liberal incentives to its most recent tenants, offering to pick up between 50 percent and 70 percent of the construction costs for finishing the office spaces.
“They (the owners) have been pretty generous with the tenant improvements,” Irons said.
He said transforming a blank space into finished offices can cost about $65 per square foot, or around $195,000.
“It could include carpeting, cabinets, walling off offices, work rooms, copy rooms and private offices,” Irons said.
Other occupants in the building include MetLife Bank’s mortgage-lending arm, MetLife Home Loans, on the third floor. The building’s ground floor is occupied by a bank branch of Columbia Bank. Building owner, The Al Angelo Co., has occupied the fifth floor since the $57 million building opened in late 2009.
