Jamie Gates of the Conway Development Corp. has a plum of a commercial site coming open, and he’s starting to market it now even though it won’t be ripe for plucking for about a year.
The privately funded economic development nonprofit executive was talking about the 150,000-SF “global center of excellence” that was originally built for Hewlett Packard and that housed 1,200 workers for information technology giant DXC Technologies before the COVID pandemic.
Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson trumpeted a DXC expansion at the Meadows Office & Technology Park nearly four years ago, but the pandemic has since transformed the workaday world.
In October 2020 DXC sold its Health & Human Services tech businesses, including the Conway operation, to Veritas Capital for $3.5 billion, creating an entity called Gainwell Technologies, whose logo still adorns the building.
The nearly 23-acre property at 355 Ledgelawn Drive is 100% leased for another year, but “obviously they do not need the amount of office space that they have right now,” Gates told us in a telephone interview. “Companies have gone to remote and hybrid work situations, and another company that was spun out, Insight [Enterprises] has moved into a smaller space in Conway.”
Conway Development Corp. has received notice that the lease won’t be renewed when it ends next year, but Gates expects a lot of interest in the space.
“We feel that it’s some of the most compelling commercial space in central Arkansas. The Meadows Office & Technology Park is great, and we recently added a 3-mile mountain bike loop at the park that has become a destination on its own.”
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