Construction on the Midtown Union project in midtown Atlanta started a mere three months before the pandemic hit. Since then, the workforce has become much less attached to their desks, raising serious questions about the long-term viability of urban offices.

But while the 26-story Midtown Union includes 612,000 square feet of office real estate, Granite Properties Senior Managing Director John Robbins said he wouldn’t change a thing.

Plano, Texas-based Granite and Whippany, New Jersey-based MetLife Investment Management are the co-developers behind Midtown Union at the intersection of Spring and 17th streets. The building is expected to officially open later this month, and investment management company Invesco is expected to move its Atlanta headquarters in later this year, occupying 300,000 square feet in the building's top nine floors.

The pandemic has led many developers to change their opinion of office real estate. But Robbins said the pandemic only reinforced his belief that “offices are about bringing people together,” and Granite and MetLife made only slight design modifications after the pandemic hit.

Midtown Union contains the same proportion of office space to multifamily, retail and hospitality as it did in its original plan, including 355 apartment units developed by StreetLights Residential, a 230-key Kimpton Hotel and 30,000 square feet of retail space.

“All along we wanted Midtown Union to be a place to connect,” Robbins told CoStar News.

Other developers and lenders have been rethinking how much office space should be included in new projects two years into the pandemic.

Since the onset of the health crisis in March 2020, businesses — especially in white-collar industries — have been trimming their office space and the amount of time workers must spend in the workplace. In April, payments platform PayPal announced it would be closing its 53,000-square-foot office in downtown San Francisco in response to a new hybrid work policy. In June, crowdsourced review app Yelp announced it was closing offices in New York, Chicago and Washington after finding that almost all its employees preferred to work remotely.

But Granite says it is bullish on the future of office. At the same time that Midtown Union was under construction, it completed a six-story, 167,922-square-foot office building, Granite Place I, in the Dallas suburb of Southlake, which is already fully leased. The five-story, 143,523-square-foot Granite Place II is under construction.

Granite said its confidence in its office projects stems from the office-specific resources it has poured into its buildings.

“The office outlook is cloudy, but there will be winners and losers,” Robbins said. “The winners will be the ones that have what we have."

Many of those features have become popular in developments during the pandemic.

That includes so many touch-free elements that someone can park in the garage and walk into an office without touching any part of the building — other than the floor they're walking on. It also includes one of the largest curated outdoor spaces in Atlanta: a partially covered patio that sits atop the multistory parking deck. And between Midtown Union’s office and residential towers is a pedestrian-only mall filled with trees and greenery.

Granite has not disclosed financial terms of its lease with Invesco. But the asset manager is likely paying a premium for its new headquarters space. The average office rent in Midtown for a three- or four-star property was $43.24 per square foot in the second quarter, according to CoStar data. Compare that to the city average of $27.02.

Granite and MetLife have not disclosed the size of their investment in Midtown Union.

Granite, MetLife and office leasing agent JLL are on the hunt for tenants to join Invesco at the property. Robbins declined to identify prospective tenants but said the pipeline is full of high-quality candidates from among the “usual suspects”: financial services, technology and advertising.

The Granite-led team shouldn’t have much trouble finding top-flight office tenants for Midtown Union, said Abe Schear, a commercial real estate attorney at Arnall Golden Gregory in Atlanta who isn’t involved in the project.

Midtown Union checks all the boxes with its combination of “quality multifamily, proximity to both Piedmont Park and the Beltline (walking path)” and easy pedestrian access to mass transit and retail, Schear said.

“The walkability gives Midtown a feeling of energy,” he said, and that’s not readily available in other parts of Atlanta.

Brooke Dewey and Adam Viente at JLL are the office listing agents. Brasfield & Gorrie is general contractor. Cooper Carry is lead architect.