Bromley Cos. taps Cushman & Wakefield to lease Midtown Tampa office towers

Bromley Cos. has selected commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield to lease up to 750,000 square feet of planned office space within Midtown Tampa, a $500 million, mixed-use development also slated to contain retail space, apartments and a hotel.

As part of the selection, Cushman & Wakefield has tapped Robin Bishop to be a senior director and lead the leasing efforts for a trio of planned office towers.

Bishop had led Bishop & Associates Inc. since founding it in 2000. Previously, she had worked at Cushman from 1989 to 1995, leasing both the Tampa City Center skyscraper in downtown Tampa and overseeing a 20 million-square-foot portfolio for communications giant Verizon along the East Coast. In all, she has 38 years of commercial real estate experience.

Bishop, who has been working with Bromley on its project, says Cushman & Wakefield’s “global platform and local market dominance will help put (Midtown) in the spotlight on a national scale.”

“How we’ll distinguish ourselves is by the fact that there’s nothing like Midtown in Tampa,” says Bishop, who has known and worked with Bromley for the past 18 years. “We’re going to be like Hyde Park on steroids. People have been saying they want live-work-play for years, and this is what Millenials are looking for.”

The first of Bromley’s three office towers at Midtown will total 176,000 square feet and is scheduled to break ground early next year. The 10-story building also will be among the first new office blocks constructed on a speculative basis in the Tampa area in the past decade.

Bishop says rental rates are still being established, but that they will most likely “have a four as the first number in the rate.”

Delivery is slated for the final quarter of 2020, Cushman & Wakefield says. The bulk of the project is slated to be completed the following year.

The project comes, however, as numerous developers, including Strategic Property Partners, Cousins Properties, Vision Properties, Echon Real Estate Services and Feldman Equities Ltd. — to name but a few — are planning or contemplating new office towers in the Tampa and St. Petersburg submarkets.

Located at Interstate 275 and North Dale Mabry Highway, Midtown Tampa is designed for 1.8 million square feet in all, and is intended to connect Tampa’s rapidly growing downtown with the Westshore Business District.

In addition to the office space, the 22-acre Midtown Tampa will contain roughly 240,000 square feet of retail space developed by Casto Southeast Realty Services and anchored by a Whole Foods Market; a roughly 400-unit Crescent Communities’ apartment complex; and a 225-key boutique hotel.