The Roxboro at Venable Center, an eight-story, 202,000-square-foot office building at 380 East Pettigrew St., has been empty since Trinity Capital Advisors and SLI Capital delivered it in early 2022. Not one tenant. Three years in.
The building is valued at $37 million and sits at the edge of Durham's revitalized warehouse district. Its courtyard connects to the larger Venable Center, which includes 221 upscale apartments, ground-level retail, a fitness center, and a 1,000-square-foot sky lounge and pool. The offices above all of that have stayed dark.
CBRE, the building's leasing agency, hasn't closed a single deal. Brad Corsmeier, an executive vice president at CBRE, said the problem isn't the building. "We've hit the bottom of the market, for sure," he said. "There's no issue with the building or the product or the economics. It's a great project. It's simply a demand thing. We've lost the deal velocity that was once there. In the last two years, downtown Durham has been stagnant."
Building speculative office space, without pre-signed tenants, is always a gamble. In the Triangle, the bet gets harder because the region is carved into suburban submarkets with uneven demand. The Roxboro was meant to set the tone for what was to come, according to a 2022 statement from Trinity managing partner Jeff Sheehan. Instead, it became a case study in bad timing.
The broader market context doesn't help. Around mid-2024, Raleigh-Durham had roughly 12.7 million square feet of empty office space, equal to about $380.5 million in lost rent annually. Durham's vacancy rate sits at 9.8 percent, lower than Raleigh's 11.1 percent, but both remain above pre-pandemic norms. The combined market covers 118.7 million square feet, with Raleigh accounting for roughly two-thirds.
Corsmeier said long-term confidence in downtown Durham hasn't gone away. The area's mix of talent and continued big-tech presence still draws investor interest, he said. For SLI Capital, which backed the project, the wait continues.