Ford to Help Transform Downtown Detroit

DETROIT—The office market in the Detroit CBD has made remarkable progress in the last half-decade, and although that growth has continued this year, several recent investment decisions by the Ford Motor Co. might overshadow that expansion. Most important, the Dearborn, MI-based automaker just purchased the iconic, and long-abandoned, Michigan Central Station, and by 2022 plans to renovate and redevelop it into a 1.2 million-square-foot downtown campus that will eventually host about 2,500 employees.

That will be a big change for the hulking structure, which grew increasingly decrepit in the past 30 years, and was the subject of many photo essays meant to illustrate the decline of the Motor City.

“It was a metaphor for the decay of the city,” John DeGroot, Detroit-based research director for Newmark Knight Frank, tells GlobeSt.com, “but now it’s a metaphor for the revival of Detroit. And it’s also going to increase the number of employees downtown and create a lot of secondary investment in the area.”

NKF just released its second quarter 2018 office trends data for the Detroit region. According to the reports, Metro Detroit’s office vacancy rate fell 50 bps to 15.6% during the second quarter of 2018, as just over 848,000 square feet was absorbed.

According to the report, the Detroit CBD has now seen 24 consecutive quarters of growth that produced over 2.6 million square feet of positive absorption. And Ford is merely the latest suburban firm to establish operations downtown. Others such as Rock Financial, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Little Caesars, Google, Inc., Meridian Health and Microsoft have already sought to tap into the city’s growing energy and skilled labor pool.