COPT to Build AL Campus for Aerospace Company

Rendering of Yulista Holdings’ headquarters. Image courtesy of COPT

Corporate Office Properties Trust is constructing a four-building campus for aerospace defense contractor Yulista Holdings at Redstone Gateway, a mixed-use, 470-acre mixed-use park in Huntsville, Ala., developed by COPT and Jim Wilson & Associates.

“About 70 percent of the top 20 defense contractors in the country lease from COPT, so we’re very high in the defense industry and very big in leasing to the federal government as well,” James Lomax, Redstone Gateway’s director of asset management and leasing, told Commercial Property Executive. “Redstone Gateway sits right outside of Gate 9 of Redstone Arsenal, which is the most highly traffic gate into the arsenal and it’s an army base with about 45,000 people going to work there every day.”

However, the unique base only includes about 800 uniformed military personnel. The majority of the population are civilian employees or government contractors.

“We approached Yulista and they had a requirement of 16 different buildings in the Huntsville market and we were able to consolidate those in four buildings and it’s just a little bit over 300,000 square feet with expansion beyond that,” Lomax added. “They are an Alaskan company, but they are going to bring their headquarters here and all their core business functions will be able to be here in this campus.”

Appealing features

Once finalized, Yulista’s campus will increase Redstone Gateway’s operational square footage to more than one million square feet. The campus is expected to be ready at the end of 2020 and include a multistory office building and three R&D facilities.

“The thing Yulista is excited about is not only that they are right outside the gate, but the access to their customers is prime,” Lomax said. “Redstone Gateway overall is an amenity-rich office park and we’ve brought in three new restaurants, added a coffee shop, have currently a 120-room hotel and are working on a second hotel.”

Yulista—a subsidiary of Calista Corp.—has been a noteworthy Department of Defense contractor for the past 16 years and is the holding company for eight different divisions that support the department in multiple areas.

In December, COPT began work on two new data centers in the Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District in Innovation Park, a 1,500-acre university-anchored corporate research park in Prince William County, Va.