Best Real Estate Deals: ConnectWise is an office deal of the year
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Dec 17, 2021

The oldest office tower in downtown Tampa landed one of the year’s biggest deals.

Park Tower will be home to ConnectWise’s headquarters after the Tampa-grown software company signed a lease for 65,000 square feet. It will also occupy a street-level storefront, further activating Park Tower and giving ConnectWise more brand recognition in its hometown.

The deal is an endorsement of the millions of dollars the tower’s ownership — a joint venture of Feldman Equities, Tower Realty Partners and City Office REIT — have poured into the building in recent years.

Key players

Ownership: City Office REIT, Feldman Equities, Tower Realty Partners

Brokers: Baharea Larsen and Kelley Iaquinta of Feldman Equities; Jimmy Garvey of Cushman & Wakefield Inc.; Ryan Reynolds of CBRE Group Inc.

Big numbers

65,000: Square footage of ConnectWise's office lease in Park Tower

$1 billion: Valuation of the Tampa software company

35% to 40%: Amount of employees expected to have permanent seats, the company said in August

Biggest challenge

ConnectWise had a large parking requirement for a downtown Tampa office tenant. The software company needed four spaces for every 1,000 square feet of office space leased (a total of 265 spaces). The pandemic shifted many office-based employees to remote work and, as a result, many office workers gave up their parking spaces in city-owned garages. The leasing team saw an opportunity and, months before the lease closed, snapped up as many available spaces as possible. The cost of those spaces was incorporated into the lease terms.