In 10 years, 10,000 people will be living Downtown.
There will be apartments on the Northbank and Southbank.
The Jacksonville Landing will be redeveloped and there will be restaurants and bars and a hip vibe through the connection of Downtown with the St. Johns River.
Oh, and the vacancy rate for office buildings will be 10 percent. (Today, it’s 24 percent).
That’s what office broker Traci Jenks sees in the city’s future.
“I have an agenda,” said Jenks, a senior director for commercial real estate firm, Cushman & Wakefield. “I want Downtown to be cool because I want to live here when I retire.”
She’ll have a hand in getting it there.
Jenks performs tenant placement and brokerage services for some of Jacksonville’s highest-profile office buildings, including Downtown’s SunTrust Tower, for which Cushman & Wakefield recently became the exclusive leasing representative.
Jenks knows what brings companies to lease offices in Downtown Jacksonville.
“It’s a younger creative class who want to be a part of changing our city and seeing it become vibrant,” she said. “The people who come Downtown already know they want to be here.”
It’s a sentiment with which Jenks can identify.
Dream of changing Downtown’s landscape
Nearly 30 years ago at the University of Georgia, Jenks switched her major from marketing to real estate after an Atlanta developer spoke to her class. It was the late 1980s and huge office towers were being built in the city’s Downtown.
“They were changing the landscape of Atlanta,” Jenks said. “It was inspiring to see you could make such a difference in a city by developing it.”
But, it would be years before Jenks got to be part of revitalization.
By the time she graduated in 1990, the country was in recession. Real estate dried up and foreclosures were rampant.
Following a boyfriend to Jacksonville, she got a job at Barnett Bank. Jenks first sold homes for bank executives who were relocating. Then she worked as an asset manager, selling properties the bank took back in foreclosures.
In 1998, when Barnett and NationsBank merged, she joined Lincoln Property Co. and sold duplicative Barnett Bank branches across the state. When everything sold, she was out of a job.
That led her to work at JAX Chamber’s economic development arm, JAXUSA Partnership (then called Cornerstone), where Jenks learned what it took to get companies to move to Jacksonville.
Twelve years ago, Jenks finally picked up the kind of job she’d trained for from the beginning, at commercial brokerage Trammell Crow (later CBRE through a merger).
She was good at her job. So good that two years ago another brokerage, Cushman & Wakefield, recruited her away.
Filling offices with tenants
Jenks represents companies that want to buy, sell, lease out or rent top office property. Downtown, for professional services firms with executives who need individual offices. Southside, for back-office companies with lots of employees collaborating at workstations. Parking is a differentiator between the two types of offices. Southside office parks have tons of free parking. Downtown, companies pay.
It’s one of the reasons why the Southside office market is booming compared to Downtown, Jenks said. But, the tides are turning because suburban office vacancy is getting tight and rents are rising.
Another good omen for Downtown: Seven of the Jacksonville’s largest office towers sold in the last two years.
“It’s a huge win for us because we’ve got new owners who are willing to renovate and actually put money back into those buildings,” Jenks said.
The SunTrust Tower was one of them. The sale converted the building from a group of disparate office condos with multiple owners back into a regular office complex, owned and managed by one company. Jenks called it a huge career accomplishment to represents the lease-out of the building.
“The new owners are going to be renovating. So there’ll be a lot of opportunity to lease up the building, and to change Downtown by getting companies in there,” she said.
Getting people to live, love Downtown
Getting Downtown office towers filled is one piece of the revitalization puzzle.
A bigger piece, Jenks said, is getting more people to live Downtown. Not just in Brooklyn, where more than 900 apartment units recently opened. But on the Northbank and Southbank.
That’s because retail follows rooftops. The bars, restaurants and shops, which will define Downtown’s character, need a customer base. Luring the residents takes place-making.
There, Jacksonville has some traction, Jenks said, with nightlife offerings at The Elbow and with the facelift of and event offerings at Hemming Park.
The sports district, too, is contributing, with football, baseball and soccer, through city’s newest team, the Jacksonville Armada FC.
What Jacksonville needs is more of it. “We’ve got to have things happening every night of the week,” Jenks said.
Thursday through Sunday is doing fine. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday need filling.
And, Jenks said, Jacksonville badly needs a new venue at the Landing, the riverfront shopping/entertainment center designed for a 1980s customer.
“It is a focal point for our city, and it’s tired,” Jenks said. “I’ve got clients staying at the Omni (hotel) who are walking over there — and I’m like, ‘ouch.’”
Compared to other cities, Jacksonville seems behind the revitalization curve. But it can get there. It once was there.
In the 1960s, Downtown was cool and hip. It had department stores, Jenks said.
“We’re a little bit behind, I’ll admit that. But I think now is our time. I really do,” she said. “I’ve been here for over 20 years and I’ve never felt as much energy for Downtown as I do now.”
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