Ongoing demand for class-A office space has led this year to the addition of two major office projects to Wilmington’s list of development activity that’s underway – Renaissance II and Mayfaire IV.

The Landfall submarket is where that demand continues to be the highest, said Brian Eckel, co-founder of Cape Fear Commercial and partner in the firm’s development arm, GHK Cape Fear Development. 

Eckel and his partners are working on Renaissance II, a 45,000-square-foot office building proposed for 6925 Fresco Drive in Renaissance Park off Military Cutoff Road.

The city of Wilmington’s Technical Review Committee initially approved the office building in June 2007, but that approval had expired.

Eckel’s company, which in addition to developing office space also finds, sells, leases and manages space for clients, decided to revive the plan.

“We initially planned and permitted the building in 2007, but we thankfully did not build at that time as we would have delivered in the summer of 2008 as the market was in a tailspin,” Eckel said. 

“We recently decided to go back through permitting … With most of our office product fully occupied in the immediate vicinity, we believe it’s the right time to move forward with the project.”

Renaissance II will have the same footprint and quality characteristics as the Morgan Stanley building, an existing office property that Cape Fear Commercial leases and manages beside the Renaissance II site, Eckel said.  

Low vacancy for office space has remained a trend in the area.

“The Landfall office submarket is enjoying extremely low vacancy rates. It has stayed in the single digits for the last year and is currently around 5 percent,” Eckel said. 

Another project is capitalizing on continued demand. 

Developer Steve Anderson and Tripp Engineering of Wilmington submitted plans in January for the fourth building in the Offices at Mayfaire group. The plans call for a new 40,500-square-foot, three-story building at 6761 Rock Spring Road behind Mayfaire Community Center.

“We had a built-up demand for some space. We went for such a long time without, and we’ve been very careful during that time to do one building at a time and be very conservative in our approach to the market,” Anderson said of The Offices at Mayfaire office park. “We had a percentage … We would not start a project if we didn’t have a certain percentage committed.”

Anderson said his company expects to close on the land in April. He has it under contract with the current owner, a Mayfaire limited liability company. 

“We hope to very soon afterwards start construction,” he said earlier this month. “We’ve very eager to get started on that.”

Anderson also developed and sold the first three Offices at Mayfaire buildings, a total of 114,000 square feet. The next in the works, The Offices at Mayfaire IV, will have a slightly bigger footprint because, as Anderson points out, nearly five of the nine floors of office space in the first three buildings are occupied by users that take up the entire floor. 

Mayfaire IV will also include a new glass feature on the south-facing side of the building.

“Every time I’ve built a building in Mayfaire, our continued positive comments are about the glass, the angled glass corners,” Anderson said. “All three buildings that we plan on building out there will have this glass feature.”

In addition to The Offices at Mayfaire IV, signs of Anderson’s along Military Cutoff Road have long advertised the coming of a fifth and sixth phase for the office development. 

He said Mayfaire V office space could come soon on the heels of or at the same time as Mayfaire IV.

“It’s all market driven … We can start that building as soon as the market dictates. We certainly would want to look at staring it within the next year. From start of IV we would want to start the beginning of V within a year’s time. We’ll be done in seven to nine months with the shell of the building,” Anderson said. 

“Some of that upfit could take a little bit longer with clients and that all comes in the order of the clients’ needs. We could have that building ready for a client in December of this year. Then what we would look to do would be a spring of 2017 start for Mayfaire V, depending on the market.”

As Anderson anticipates completing The Offices at Airlie, a new building at the corner of Military Cutoff Road and Wrightville Avenue, around the end of March, he said he’s also been on the lookout for potential new development elsewhere in the city, specifically in the midtown section of Oleander Drive.