PHOENIX-High-tech consulting firm Cognizant has signed a 12-year lease for 130,681 square feet of class A office space at Canyon Corporate Plaza II. The deal is one of the largest office leases signed in the Phoenix metro area in the past 12 months.
Cognizant’s new home at 2512 W. Dunlap Ave. will house more than 1,000 employees. The company is more than doubling its space from its current location at 2411 West Peoria Ave., which houses 500 employees.
It will move into its new space in June, according to Jim Achen Jr., a senior vice president with Transwestern’s local office. He and William Zurek represented the landlord, Washington, DC-based Northridge Capital LLC. Gregg Najarian, a senior managing director with Studley, and Richard Collins, a principal with Ross Brown Partners Inc., represented Cognizant.
Achen tells GlobeSt.com that Cognizant will backfill space currently occupied by American Express, which terminated its lease early and plans to vacate in May. With the Cognizant lease, the two-building, 300,000-square-foot Canyon Corporate Plaza is 90% leased.
“We had a suspicion that Amex would notice us, so we began talking to Cognizant over a year ago,” Achen says. “We were looking at, potentially, a huge chunk of vacant space in a 25% vacant market, but we managed to dodge that bullet with no downtime for the landlord.”
Including the Cognizant deal, the Achen and Zurek team has been responsible for two of the largest office leases in Maricopa County. The team represented Lexington Realty Trust in a 95,133-square-foot lease with DuPont Air Products Nano Materials at 8555 S. River Pkwy. in the ASU Research Park in Tempe, AZ.
Achen says the class A building was entirely leased to ASML. However, the high-tech company wanted out of its lease, and Achen and Zurek were able to backfill the ASML space with DuPont. The company will initially sublease space from ASML, and once that lease expires, a new 10-year lease with the landlord will take effect.
Currently, DuPont occupies just 30,000 square feet. “This is a nice expansion story for the Phoenix metro market because DuPont will continue to create high quality, white collar jobs,” Achen says.
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