Raleigh-Based Fortune 500 Company Reclaims Part of Sublease

Advance Auto Parts Tower. Image courtesy of Kane Realty Corp.

Aftermarket automotive parts provider and retailer Advance Auto Parts has taken off the market a one-floor, 30,000-square-foot portion of its 93,573-square-foot sublease at Advance Auto Parts Tower in Raleigh, N.C., the Triangle Business Journal reported. In 2021, the Fortune 500 company put up for sublease the 16th, 17th and 18th floors of the 20-story building, two of which landed tenants in 2022.

Advance Auto Parts became the 328,600-square-foot Class A office tower’s anchor tenant in 2019, with an original pre-lease comprising the building’s 12th and 16th through 21st floors, totaling 218,000 square feet, with a terms set for the end of 2032.

In 2021, the tenant made three floors available for sublease. Raleigh-based cloud computing and wireless networking services provider Relay committed to the 18th floor in mid-2022, while the 16th floor also gained another tenant.

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Owned and operated by its developer, Kane Realty Corp., Advance Auto Parts Tower came online in 2020 and comprises 11 office stories with 31,000-square-foot floor plates. Duda Paine & SRSSA were the architects, while Brockette Davis Drake provided structural engineering services for the project. Onsite amenities include a fitness center, cafes, kitchen spaces and conference centers, 880 covered private parking spaces and 8,234 square feet of ground-floor retail space, according to CommercialEdge information.

The North Hills skyline. Image courtesy of Kane Realty Corp.

Located at 4200 Six Forks Road in North Hills, the property is just off Interstate 440, while downtown Raleigh is 4 miles south. Research Triangle Park, home to one of the city’s largest life science and office districts, is 14 miles away.

Office leasing in the City of Oaks

Economic headwinds, as well as changing needs for office work has greatly impacted sublease availability within the Raleigh-Durham market. At the end of 2022, more than 3 million square feet of space was available for sublease, marking a 7.7 percent increase quarter-over-quarter and up 46 percent year-over-year, according to a fourth quarter report from Colliers. At that point in time, the market had a vacancy rate of 12.8 percent, up 66 basis points since the previous quarter, the same source shows.

Other high-profile leases around Raleigh include Highwoods Properties’ headquarters relocation to Wells Fargo Capital Center in the city’s downtown area. Emblematic of the market’s emergence as a life science research, development and manufacturing hub, bio manufacturing company TARGAN leased the entirety of the Midtown BioCenter, a lab facility scheduled for completion in 2023.