These Are Lyft's 5 Most Popular Office Destinations In Atlanta
What do major media, hammers and nails and the Southeast's tallest skyscraper have in common? They are all really popular with Lyft riders in Atlanta.
Ride-sharing operators — dominated mainly by Uber and Lyft — have become a ubiquitous sight throughout Metro Atlanta. Even office building landlords are feeling their impacts.
“No question about it. Ride-share represents an enormous number of visits to our buildings,” Hines Senior Managing Director John Heagy said. “All of our office buildings these days have a minimum of a pull-up location so a guest or visitor can be dropped off right outside of the building.”
It is an industry that is expected to grow by leaps and bounds. Revenues from ride-sharing companies across the U.S. are expected to top $18B this year. By 2023, that number could surpass $23B, according to Statista. The number of customers also is expected to shoot up, from 53 million this year to 61.3 million by 2023.
Lyft estimates that its operations in Atlanta alone have a more than $77M impact on the region with customers spending more in the local economy using its service. In Atlanta, 30% of Lyft's users do not own a personal vehicle.
According to Lyft, here are among the five most popular office destinations in Metro Atlanta, in no particular order:
Ponce City Market
Jamestown Properties' redevelopment of a former Sears multistory warehouse has become the standard-bearer for urban revitalization. Its office portion is home to such tenants as athenahealth, MailChimp and coworking operator Industrious. It's also a popular attraction due to its retailers and food hall.
The mixed-use project set a record for office rents in 2017 by breaking $50/SF, the Atlanta Business Chronicle previously reported.
Jamestown CEO Matt Bronfman said Uber and Lyft, along with electric scooters and bikes, have had a big impact on the project, prompting the developer to designate numerous areas around the property for ride-share pickup and drop-off zones.
“Uber and Lyft have never provided us specific metrics or user data, but we have been told informally we are [the] second-most Ubered destination in Atlanta after the airport and have similar numbers with Lyft,” Bronfman said in an email. “It has changed how PCM employees, residents and visitors access the property.”
CNN Center
While not strictly an office building, CNN Center is one of the city's top tourist attractions as well as home to the cable news giant CNN. It is also home to the Omni Atlanta Hotel at CNN Center, a more than 1,000-room hotel with 120K SF of meeting space.
Bank of America Plaza
Under the ownership of San Francisco-based Shorenstein, the iconic skyscraper — the tallest in the Southeast — has been undergoing a reinvention of sorts.
With the help of CBRE, Shorenstein has been creating plug-and-play tech space in the more than 1M SF tower, a program that has helped with its leasing momentum. That effort has led to some 100K SF in office deals with an assortment of tech firms seeking a presence near Georgia Tech, including software companies Revel Systems and Riskalyze.
The Home Depot headquarters
The corporate campus for the home improvement giant is in the Cumberland/Galleria market at 2455 Paces Ferry Road in Smyrna. The company employs 14,000 workers between its headquarters and a technology center nearby in Marietta.
Late last year, the company got approval from the Cobb County Development Authority for property tax breaks on leasing out two additional buildings across the highway from its headquarters as well as for its online operations, which will add an additional 700 employees to its local roster, the Marietta Daily Journal reported.
NCR headquarters
The gleaming complex at the corner of Eighth and Spring streets in Midtown Atlanta opened last year. Developed by Cousins Properties, the 750K SF, two-tower campus is home to the company's 5,000 employees.
Heagy said it makes sense that NCR as well as the Home Depot headquarters would be popular destinations for Lyft. It is not only employees who likely use the ride-share service, but also vendors and guests visiting the companies.
“Any organization the size of Home Depot or NCR, those are massive employers with massive amounts of space,” he said. “Those buildings are magnets for massive numbers of people.”
JLL Managing Director Adam Viente said he suspects that Lyft is carting more visitors to those companies than employees who may use them for their daily commute to work. After all, demand among office tenants for parking spaces is not decreasing. To the contrary, it has been growing, even within Atlanta's central business district, Viente said.
“I think it's something that's evolving over time. And I think the early adopters who take that to and from work have been more millennials and Generation Z,” he said. “That leaves me to believe that any impact that Uber and Lyft have had is nominal ... on people's daily commutes into Atlanta.”
