The chamber, currently ensconced in 17,000 sf at One Congress in the CBD, is considering staying put, but also is looking at other downtown and suburban buildings, says Colliers Oxford Commercial's Rick Whiteley who's conducting the search with his colleague Bob Wynn. The chamber's lease at One Congress is up in October.
The new space would be 12,000 sf to 15,000 sf in a building that's convenient for members and employees and has good value, Whiteley tells GlobeSt.com. "I think their preference would be to stay downtown," he says. "But because they are a nonprofit, they're looking to achieve the best value. So we're evaluating downtown as well as some suburban locations."
Whiteley says the chamber offers a building owner something more than the average tenant. "The way we see this is the chamber being a great asset to any building that they're going to go into just in terms of the daily meetings they have with community business leaders and the presence and prestige and visibility they bring to any building," he says. "That's something we consider to be intrinsic value to whatever landlord might be vying for them."
Whiteley and Wynn have been working with the chamber since January. They started with 61 buildings. The architecture firm Graeber, Simmons & Cowan is working with the chamber on planning the new office space.
The chamber moved to One Congress in the early 1990s. Its previous home was a small building on city-owned land between Palmer Auditorium and City Coliseum, where the city's new community center is being built.
One Congress, built in 1987, has 517,840 sf on 30 floors. Equity Office Properties manages the building.
In the past, a chamber of commerce pretty much had to be downtown. That's where many of its key business constituencies were located. But locations outside have become stronger candidates since the chamber made its last move and other locations aren't out of the question. Many of Austin's technology companies have located in suburban offices along US Highway 183 or the Capital of Texas Highway.
Still, the center of Austin business remains downtown. The new city hall-Computer Sciences Corp. complex is under construction two blocks from the current chamber location and the expanded Austin Convention Center is two blocks west.
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