Lincoln Property Co. has purchased Charlotte-based developer The Spectrum Cos. in a deal that Lincoln says will help it grow its footprint across the Carolinas.

Dallas-based Lincoln will combine its Carolinas platform with Spectrum and will also include Spectrum’s northern and central Florida multifamily business, Lincoln said in a Tuesday press release. The companies say the move will help boost the combined firm’s development and acquisition pipeline.

The companies’ portfolios will merge well because of Spectrum’s strong focus on multifamily development, executives from both firms told the Charlotte Business Journal, which first reported the news. Spectrum has developed almost 7,000 multifamily units since its founding, according to the release.

The sum of the sale was not disclosed.

“Lincoln has been focused on growing and investing in the Carolinas for many years, and Spectrum presented a unique opportunity to accelerate that strategy,” Johno Harris, senior executive vice president at Lincoln, told Bisnow.

He added that Spectrum’s “exceptional team” complements Lincoln’s existing platform well.

“As we looked at the next phase of growth in the region, it became clear that bringing our organizations together would create a stronger business, expand our capabilities and position us to better serve clients and pursue new opportunities across the Carolinas,” he said.

A spokesperson for Spectrum didn’t comment in time for publication.

Spectrum’s 43 employees will move from a 5K SF office into Lincoln’s two-floor, 200K SF headquarters at Piedmont Town Center in SouthPark, which already employs 260 people, CBJ reported. No job cuts are expected.

Executives told CBJ that Spectrum’s name will soon change to Lincoln.

Lincoln’s global portfolio spans 720M SF, according to the company’s website. It manages 27M SF in the Carolinas. The developer’s Charlotte-based work includes the 3M SF Legacy Union office tower complex.

Spectrum’s 4.4M SF portfolio will now become “a significant expansion of Lincoln’s regional footprint,” according to the press release. The company’s local assets previously included Vantage South End, a 635K SF mixed-use development that it sold to Cousins Properties in 2024.

Charlotte ranks among “the most attractive markets for investors” in the country, according to CBRE’s 2026 North America Investor Intentions Survey. Charlotte’s multifamily market is “maintaining stronger demand fundamentals than most peer markets,” a first-quarter Matthews report said, with a 6.2 percent vacancy rate a signal that demand has absorbed new supply.

It’s not just New York and California — the office market is getting healthier across the country.

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National office vacancy rates declined 10 basis points in the second quarter, with more than half of the 92 markets tracked by Cushman & Wakefield notching a dip in vacancy rates. The second-quarter results reinforced an uptick at the start of the year that has been building despite macroeconomic volatility. 

Vacancy has declined for two consecutive quarters as tenants fill the highest-quality buildings, leading some demand to trickle into the Class-A tier as the worst office space is being taken out of commission, with more than 90,000 apartments in the office-to-residential conversion pipeline. 

“The first half of 2026 reinforced that the office recovery is no longer confined to a handful of leading markets or trophy assets,” David Smith, the head of Americas insights at Cushman & Wakefield, said in a statement. 

Vacancy declined in 49 of the 92 markets tracked by Cushman, or 53% of cities. Tech firms building artificial intelligence tools continue to drive leasing activity, and the best-performing markets continue to be tech-centric hubs. San Francisco, Orange County and Midtown Manhattan recorded the largest year-over-year declines in vacancy, according to Cushman.

Other areas around New York City are well represented in the top 20 markets for vacancy declines, joined by secondary markets including Kansas City, Missouri; Charlotte; Jacksonville, Florida; Austin; and others. Many of the markets are bouncing back from cyclical vacancy highs, with San Francisco gaining 364 basis points of occupancy but leaving overall vacancy elevated at 30%. 

The wide representation of markets seeing vacancy dips suggests that office leasing activity is more broad-based and not solely reliant with tech tenants.

Total U.S. office inventory also contracted by 33M SF over the past five quarters, and 20 markets have had at least 1% of their office space taken off the market, as more conversions are proposed. 

Among markets moving in the other direction, vacancy climbed the most year-over-year in Cleveland, although the city’s vacancy rate is below the national average of 20.1%.

Boston, Oklahoma City, Puget Sound’s Eastside outside Seattle and Los Angeles’ central business district round out the five markets where vacancy has grown the most year-over-year. Boston’s vacancy rate is still below the national average, and neighborhoods outside Downtown Los Angeles have seen vacancy plateau over the last three quarters.

Tenants vacated a net 300K SF of space during the second quarter, but absorption for the rolling 12 quarters totaled 14.3M SF after revisions to previous quarters’ totals pushed move-ins higher and suggest that this quarter’s total could also shift upward.

Sublease availability has also declined 15% year-over-year to 96M SF, its lowest point since early 2021, and continuing a downward trend that Cushman says historically precedes a broader market recovery. 

More conversions will be announced, helping support gradual occupancy improvement across the sector as it benefits from healthier supply-side dynamics, Smith said. 

Law firms across the country have watched their caseloads explode under a triple whammy of increased artificial intelligence usage, rising regulatory uncertainty and a more litigious business climate.

These new business challenges have supercharged law practices’ growth. Flush with cash, they have been gobbling up office space at a pace few other industries can match, growing their footprints after years of shrinkage.

“The folks who signed a lease in 2019, 10-year leases, they’re coming up in a few years,” said SmithGroup senior workplace strategist Madeline Dunsmore, who focuses on legal clients. “These are big firms with big budgets, and suddenly, in this market, those budgets go pretty far.” 

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Compared to the pre-pandemic average, legal leasing activity was up 46% in the year trailing the first quarter of 2026, while tech leasing in the same period was down 8% from its pre-pandemic average, according to CBRE.

The legal industry signed 4.6M SF leases in the first three months of 2026, part of a string of four years of record leasing activity, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

The trend represents a reversal from a decade ago, when the average law firm was giving back 25% of its office space when signing a new lease.

Firms are signing for larger blocks, renewing early and planting flags in fast‑growing markets as they compete for attorneys with specialized AI and compliance expertise. With legal hours rising and AI‑related legislation proliferating across the country, the sector’s office growth now reflects a broader shift.

“The legal profession is recession-proof, and it’s been consistently more office-centric than other industries,” Cushman & Wakefield Head of Insights for the Americas David Smith said. “I think some firms are opportunistic.”

The average firm’s profit growth last year was 13%, according to a joint state of the industry report by Georgetown Law and the Thomson Reuters Institute. 

The report says the surge in demand lifting profits is due in large part to chaos, including trade wars, regulatory upheaval and geopolitical tensions that “require constant legal navigation.” 

These demand drivers led to a 3.9% year-over-year jump in the total hours worked by lawyers last year, one of the most rapid expansions the report has ever tallied. 

Legal leasing continues to grow in top-tier markets. In May, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett finalized a 916K SF lease at Extell Development’s upcoming New York tower at 570 Fifth Ave., Manhattan’s largest office lease in six years. 

Firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Goodwin Procter expanded late last year as part of an industry “space race.” 

Legal clients have accounted for 17% of Manhattan leasing volume this year, up from 11% in all of 2025, according to Savills.

But the industry’s growth is also driving more activity in regional markets with growing populations, business expansion or evolving office dynamics. In Miami, the legal industry now makes up 20% of office leasing, versus 10% pre-pandemic. 

Nashville, Charlotte and Charleston, South Carolina, have all seen similar jumps, and Austin and Dallas have seen booms in new legal spaces due to firms opening satellite offices, Smith said.

“There are countless examples of people just doubling down and renewing with similar amounts of space or slightly more than they had at their large offices,” Smith said.

The number of job postings among law firms for lawyers with AI skills and experience has jumped seven times since generative AI became more prevalent in 2022, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

“There has also been an increase in AI-related bills introduced into current legislative sessions across more than half of states,” Smith said. “This unprecedented legislative activity is a driving force for top law firms to have and grow their AI practice groups.”

But it remains to be seen if the chaos that has driven increased revenues proves to be a sustainable business strategy. The Georgetown-Reuters report hints at substantial financial pressures — including growth in spending on AI tools but an inability to charge premium AI-level fees — and the potential for a boom-and-bust cycle coming to the industry.

Firms are racing to load up on tech and talent, and workforce costs are up 8.2% compared to 2024, according to the Georgetown-Reuters report. 

“Certain law firms, even though they’re becoming more efficient from a utilization-of-space perspective, are actually growing because they’re acquiring attorneys and end up expanding their offices as a result,” said Ryan Lopez, vice president of leasing at Carr Properties.

The amount of office space needed per attorney is down from 925 SF before the pandemic to 746 SF today, but other needs are filling the gaps in law firms’ requirements.

Legal firms want to expand with more collaboration areas and more war room space for mock trials and strategy sessions, and they want high-end amenity space as a talent magnet.

Hospitality-driven design, gyms, pools and collaboration spaces are in, taking up to one-fifth of new offices, Smith said. Other in-demand amenities include parking, especially for partners, as well as conference and meeting rooms sizable enough for events and dinners.

“Rather than just cutting costs, firms are investing in placemaking, shared spaces that support culture and client interaction,” CBRE Managing Director of Americas Consulting Emily Botello said.

They are also investing in proprietary software and AI systems that need staff to oversee them, scaling up space needs where the mid-2010s removal of physical law libraries shrunk office footprints.

“The bottom line is that AI is creating demand for AI legal services, and it is also creating demand for AI support positions within law firms to implement, manage and maintain AI systems,” Smith said. 

Charlotte-based Atrium Health is seeking to build its first hospital in Metro Atlanta.

Atrium is proposing to build an acute care general teaching hospital on a 40-acre campus in Fulton County, according to a filing with the Georgia Department of Community Health, first reported by Axios.

The proposed facility would help provide care to underserved patients who previously went to WellStar Atlanta Medical Center and its affiliate WellStar AMC South, which both closed in 2022, according to the filing.

The hospital would include an emergency department and could provide other services, such as perinatal and neonatal care, diagnostic imaging and surgeries. It would start out with 50 beds and be affiliated with the Morehouse School of Medicine, Axios reported.

Atrium, which is part of Advocate Health, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The proposed hospital would anchor a mixed-use campus at 675 Metropolitan Parkway SW that is intended to include office, retail, residential and medical facilities. It would be located about half a mile from Morehouse School of Medicine’s main campus.

Atrium bought the 40-acre campus near the West End MARTA Station in 2024. It hadn’t previously revealed its plans for the land — home to MET Atlanta, a 1.1M SF historic warehouse — since the purchase. But one city council member predicted at the time that it would mean a new hospital for Atlanta.

In May, city officials unveiled that Atlanta was teaming up with Morehouse and a nonprofit health system to build an $800M hospital, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported. The officials didn’t disclose the nonprofit or where the hospital would be located. 

Atrium Health has two other health facilities in Georgia: Atrium Health Navicent in Macon and Atrium Health Floyd in Rome, according to Atlanta News First.

1900 Lawrence St. in Denver

A prominent downtown Denver office building has landed a new tenant.

National architecture firm Cooper Carry will move its Colorado office from Boulder to Denver’s 1900 Lawerence office tower later this year, the company confirmed with Bisnow on Monday.

Cooper Carry signed a lease for approximately 5,700 SF at 1900 Lawrence St., a 30-story office building that opened in 2024. 

The firm’s new office space on the 18th floor of the downtown Denver building will accommodate up to 45 employees, according to Cooper Carry.

“Downtown Denver is in the midst of a meaningful resurgence,” Cooper Carry CEO Kyle Reis said in a statement. “We see tremendous momentum returning to the urban core, from investment and development activity to the renewed energy across its business and cultural institutions.”

The new office will primarily include open work areas, private offices and business support services, according to a commercial construction permit filed with the city of Denver on June 11. Cooper Carry will be the first business to occupy this space. The space also gives it flexibility to expand, principal Krista Dumkrieger said in a statement.

Cooper Carry established its presence in Colorado after it acquired Boulder-based architecture firm 505Design in 2023. The Boulder office employs 25 people, the firm said in a statement.

Cooper Carry was founded in 1960. It has five offices across the U.S., including locations in Atlanta, New York City, Charlotte and Washington, D.C.

1900 Lawrence is a 720K SF mixed-use building in Denver’s central business district. Other tenants at the property include Monfort Cos., Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Reed Smith and D.A. Davidson. Denver restaurateur Troy Guard is also expected to open an eatery in the office tower next year, as reported by The Denver Post.

In fall 2024, 1900 Lawrence leasing agent Jamie Roupp told the Denver Business Journal that top-floor leasing at the office tower was $45 per SF, triple-net.

Last July, Riverside Investment & Development landed a loan extension and recapitalization for 1900 Lawrence. The $242M loan was extended through mid-2027, according to previous Bisnow reporting.

Austin is leading all U.S. cities in office-using employment growth, even though its office vacancy rate remains well above the national average.

The Sun Belt filled the top five spots in office-use employment, which included Raleigh, North Carolina, Nashville, Dallas and Charlotte, according to a recent Avison Young report. Between 2019 and 2025, Austin’s office-using employment grew by roughly 34%. Raleigh saw the second-highest growth at approximately 23%. 

Avison Young attributed the trend to healthier demand and elevated leasing activity.

But despite job growth, Austin posted a 22.4% office vacancy rate in the first quarter, according to Colliers. This rate has remained flat year-over-year, with Q1 2025 reporting a 22.5% vacancy rate. The national average was 18.6% during the first quarter of 2026, CBRE reported.

However, there is hope on the horizon. With Austin leading the nation in office-use growth, the metro area’s vacancy rate is likely to gradually decline, Avison Young’s Regional Manager of Market Intelligence Ariel Guerrero told Bisnow. 

“With Austin’s office development pipeline now slowing significantly and the metro still leading the nation in office-using job growth, vacancy has likely peaked and should gradually trend downward over the next year,” he said.

Since 2020, nearly 14M SF of new office space has been delivered, causing a sharp oversupply, as noted by Cushman & Wakefield.

New office construction has slowed significantly as the market works through that oversupply. The pipeline had only 756K SF expected to be fully delivered by the end of the third quarter, according to a separate CBRE report. 

Additionally, Austin is reported to have positive net absorption in Q1, with 110 tenants seeking 4.4M SF of space, CBRE stated. The metro’s improving office demand mirrors the broader national trend, which CBRE reported as the eighth straight quarter of positive demand.

Guerrero said the expected decline in the vacancy rate likely won’t be uniform across all office building classes, at least not in the near term. Trophy and Class-A assets will see rates decline before what he described as “older vintage buildings.”

“In the meantime, it remains a tenant-favorable market, presenting a window for occupiers to secure long-term leases before conditions tighten and pricing power begins to shift back toward landlords,” he said.

BWE has secured $38.92 million to refinance 194 units of Woodland Park by the Lake, a 240-unit gated condominium community in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.

Ryan Morris, vice president, and Max Miller, analyst, both in BWE’s Chicago office, originated the five-year Freddie Mac loan on behalf of the sponsor, a joint venture between a Chicago-based property management firm and a Chicago-based investor group. The joint venture originally acquired 170 units in the property in 2019 as part of a fractured condo deal, and since then, they have purchased more units and substantially renovated those homes. The refinancing accounts for 194 of the total 240 units.

“With its recent stabilization and the strong Chicago rental market, it was the ideal time to refinance so that our client can continue to acquire and renovate additional units in the property,” said Morris. Located at 3423 S Cottage Grove Avenue, Woodland Park by the Lake is a gated, seven-acre residential community.

Koeppel Rosen LLC, leasing and management agent for the Rosen family portfolio, secured five new office leases totaling 15,474 square feet at 1261 Broadway, an 11-story building in Manhattan’s Midtown South neighborhood. The leases included the following:

• Abell Eskew Landau LLP signed a new 7772-square-foot lease in a relocation from its previous space at 265 Fifth Ave. The law firm was represented by Nick Farmakis and Jordan Weiss of Savills.

• Law firm Hunter Cottingham PLLC signed a lease for 4,599 square feet. Robert Yaffa of RDY Advisors, LLC, and Claire Koeppel of Newmark represented Hunter Cottingham.

• Joseph J. Blake and Associates, Inc., a real estate appraisal and valuation firm, leased 1,467 square feet and was represented by Bradley Cohn of Adams & Company Real Estate.

• Nisso & Co Trading Corp., a wholesale jewelry distributor, leased 955 square feet.

• RSLT Capital Management LLC, an investment management firm, leased 681 square feet, represented by JD Cohen of Newmark & Company Real Estate, Inc.

“Tenants across a variety of industries are focused on securing efficient workspace in highly accessible Midtown locations,” said Max Koeppel, director of leasing at Koeppel Rosen, who represented ownership in-house for all five transactions. “Many tenants are finding that at 1261 Broadway, which offers flexibility, strong value relative to the market, and floor plates that work well for tenants in this size range.”

Gantry has secured a $16 million permanent loan to refinance the Kirkland Business Center located at 11860 NE 112th St in Kirkland, Washington.

Originally delivered in 1962 and 1969, the 104,000-square-foot, multi-tenant buildings are 100% leased to a range of small bay tenants. Gantry’s Principals Mike Wood and Mike Taylor, and Senior Associate Tim Brown, with the firm’s Seattle production office, represented the borrower, a private real estate investor. The seven-year, fixed-rate loan was provided by one of Gantry’s correspondent insurance company lenders and features cash-out proceeds with full-term interest-only payments. Gantry will service the loan on behalf of the lender.

“Well-located Puget Sound multi-tenant industrial continues to be a preferred allocation target for our network of insurance company lenders,” said Wood. “Their stable, fixed-rate permanent programs are attractive for legacy hold investors seeking to capitalize on long-term appreciation, historic performance, and strong operating metrics.”

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. is consolidating its workforce into a new space at Broadwest, a 600,000-square-foot mixed-use project in Nashville.  The Nashville Business Journal reports that the 51,000-square-foot space will include a new client center with twice the capacity of its current space, flexible workspaces, access to on-site amenities, and capacity for up to 280 employees across two floors, with room for continued growth. The new space will be open to JPMorgan Chase employees starting in early 2028.

The office will feature J.P. Morgan signage at the top of a Nashville building for the first time.

Brie Bley of CBRE represented JPMorganChase and Bill Adair and Ashley Marshall represented Propst Companies in the transaction.

Opening in 2021, the Broadwest development also includes a 34-story condo tower, the 234-room Conrad Nashville hotel and 125,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.

The bank has 500 employees across the state, with nearly 400 employees in the Greater Nashville area.