City of Wilmington looking into purchase of former PPD building

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — Wilmington City Council will consider an agenda item at their January 24th meeting to purchase the Thermo Fisher Scientific Building, formerly the PPD Building, in downtown Wilmington.

Council will provide a fully refundable $500,000 earnest money deposit to explore purchase of a 12.5-acre campus. The deposit provides the city with 120 days to evaluate all aspects of the potential acquisition. The campus includes a 1,000-space parking deck, 370,000 square feet of office space, and two adjoining development tracts.

The office building currently houses Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Wilmington offices and the purchase agreement would include a lease for a portion of the building to Thermo Fisher for a period of at least three years. The city would occupy a significant proportion of the building and the rest of the space would be made available for lease at market rate.

The purchase agreement includes a negotiated sales price of $68 million for the entire campus, including office furnishings, which reports a combined real and personal property tax value of $141 million as of 2022.

Acquiring the campus would allow the city to:

• Consolidate departments currently housed across multiple different office buildings under one roof and meet the city’s long-term space needs
• Divest as many as six city office facilities that would no longer be needed, providing new opportunities for downtown revitalization
• Utilize the campus’s existing parking deck to provide additional parking capacity for the city’s growing northern downtown, including the nearby Riverfront Park and Live Oak Bank Pavilion
• Sell or otherwise develop the campus’s adjoining development tracts to offset acquisition costs and further bolster revitalization efforts in the former industrial site

In 2021, the City of Wilmington hired an architecture firm to conduct a long-term space needs assessment. Over the course of many years, city departments grew to occupy multiple office facilities, including several aging facilities with increasing costs to operate and maintain. In November 2022, the architecture firm presented a final report, estimating $90-96 million in capital needs to redevelop a right-sized city administration building.

A PPD spokesperson says interest in the property has been high, with a number of proposals received from interested parties, including from the City of Wilmington, saying no agreements have been signed at this time.