Little Rock Tech Park Sparks New Interest

The second phase of the Little Rock Technology Park included gutting six stories at 421 Main St. in downtown Little Rock to make room for larger, intermediary office spaces. The building, which previously housed the state Department of Education, is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Photo provided)

The Little Rock Technology Park is sparking new interest this year after facing a “slow” back half of 2024, according to Executive Director Brent Birch.

The space is currently 77% occupied, a rate that Birch said has held “pretty steady” for the last couple of years. And this year, the Tech Park has seen more people calling, more tours and more companies “pulling the trigger” on renting.

“We feel pretty good, but we want more, of course,” Birch said, noting there have been times when the park was full and had to turn down potential tenants.

Phase 1 of the project, 38,000 SF that opened in 2017, has 44 total office spaces across six floors, as well as multiple desks. As of April 25, 10 of the offices were open. Total rent for occupied spaces in April was $37,601.69.

Rent varies by square footage and type of office, with companies like AccuCode AI renting two 104-SF offices for $465 each. The Venture Center, which takes up the entire 5,016-SF sixth floor of the building, pays more than $4,500 a month for its space.

Dedicated desks cost $200 per month, but all tenants have access to Wi-Fi, conference rooms and meeting spaces.

Currently, the Tech Park totally operates off of rental income from its office spaces and parking lots. Any money it receives from the city must be used on capital expenditures, like acquiring land and renovating buildings.

Birch said there can be a lot of “churn” with tenants, because the end goal is for companies to use the Tech Park as an accelerator and “get big enough to move out.”

And this has happened for a few tenants, including Apptegy, digital product agency Few, and most recently, BOND.AI, which is set to have fully moved into the Simmons Tower in downtown Little Rock by the end of the month.

“The Tech Park is a fantastic location, and we will always consider it our first home,” Christopher Law, BOND.AI’s vice president of marketing, said. “The goal is to have companies grow and leave, and we have accomplished that.”

The company moved to the Tech Park, located at 415-417 Main St., from New York in 2017. It originally had three in-person employees and now has more than a dozen and several advisers in town as well, Law said.

Phase 2

Another 53,000 SF across six stories is under construction at 421 Main St. as part of Phase 2 of the Tech Park. A sub-phase of the renovation has been completed, with Labscoop of Little Rock as the initial tenant.

Labscoop, a marketplace platform that simplifies lab supply ordering, has occupied different spaces in the Tech Park since it opened.

The company will occupy 45% of Phase 2’s third floor, which is the only floor that has been fully renovated so far.

Kundan Das, founder and CEO of Labscoop, said the Tech Park has been “amazing,” and that the project offers key infrastructure to startups.

“We needed to expand our cold and cryogenic storage to meet growing demand, and the timing of Phase 2 becoming available aligned perfectly,” Das said. “More importantly, the Little Rock Technology Park allowed us to configure the space exactly as we needed, including installing numerous outlets to power critical equipment, establishing backup power generation, installing lab bench-height electrical outlets, custom flooring and dedicated access controls.”

Unlike Phase 1, which offers small spaces for month-to-month rent, Phase 2 is designed to be an intermediary space for companies that are too large for an office suite, but not looking to move out of the Tech Park. Companies in Phase 2 will rent either a half-floor or a full floor of the building.

The first floor of Phase 2 is set to be a conference center, which is not yet finished out, Birch said. And the second floor is small, but will have a podcast studio that tenants can use. Both the conference room and studio will also be available to rent for non-tenants.

“We’re having some discussions with a potential group that is interested in finishing out just the second floor, and waiting on some pricing from CDI, who’s the contractor over there,” Birch said. “But it’s early.”

The fourth, fifth and sixth floors of Phase 2 are “completely gutted” but have not been finished yet.

Birch said the Tech Park is “currently seeking opportunities to find pockets of money to finish that building or finish a floor,” after the Little Rock sales tax increase failed in the fall. The tax increase included money allocated to finish Phase 2.

“You would hope that voters would see it as a good investment to give the tech industry a home base,” Birch said. “Hopefully, that could be passed in the future, and that would definitely help us.”

But he also doesn’t want to “overbuild.”

“We don’t want to do all that and then it just sits empty,” Birch said. “So you would like to see someone that needs space of that size, because we’re very mindful we’re dealing with public dollars.”

Phase 2 was initially funded with $1.7 million in leftover tax proceeds from Phase 1 and $3 million from the city of Little Rock’s general revenue budget.

“If somebody walked in the door today and said, ‘I want to lease the entire sixth floor,’ we would go through the process of negotiating that lease, what the tenants share of that is going to be, and then how to pay for that,” Birch said. “We would probably finance it and then pay that back from the rent.”

The goal is for companies in Phase 1 to move into Phase 2 and then eventually out of Phase 2 into a bigger space in Little Rock. Most companies would be allowed to rent a space in Phase 2 for a maximum of three years.

Birch hopes that the Tech Park can create a more robust tech scene in central Arkansas, so that when tenants do move out, new companies are ready to move in.

And both Das and Michael Whitacre, BOND.AI’s chief revenue officer, said the Tech Park offers important tools to tech startups.

“The collaboration with like-minded entrepreneurs and technology companies, the office space is extremely reasonable from a cost standpoint, the flexibility and the ambiance,” Whitacre said. “Those are the things that a new startup would find attractive.”