re: Will Gentrification Ever Happen in Baton Rouge?

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There are apartments, townhome and parking too in the development. It’s not just office space and IBM isn’t the only tenan

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IIRC, the developer did well. They are about to start another similar building by the water campus dock thing. It would have been farther along, but the pandemic slowed down everything. I think that’s going to be geared towards engineering companies though and not tech. And Louisiana desperately needs to attract more tech service centers like IBM and DXE.

IBM’s service center isn’t the only office tenant in the IBM building BTW. They have a service center there that takes up a lot of space, but there are 5-6 other companies in there including a couple of B4 accounting/consulting field offices and the Cane’s corporate office.

That’s a very nice building. If space opens up there, it will attract tenants from older, more outdated buildings.

As bad as the office market has been nationwide since the pandemic, it’s actually comparatively healthy in New Orleans and Baton Rouge partially because those two markets were never super hot for speculative office towers. It also helps that the local populace isn’t as terrified of Covid as they are in Minneapolis, San Francisco, etc.

There is office availability in Baton Rouge (albeit not as much as bigger markets like Atlanta or Houston), but there really isn’t a lot of buildings where a tenant can get more than 2500-3000 square feet on the same floor. That’s why they are looking closely at another low to mid rise office building.

And several office buildings in the SoLa cities have been converted to residential, reducing available supply. And state workers in BR are starting to get back to the office now.