by The company formerly known as Compuware Corp. is leaving the downtown Detroit office tower its co-founder built in 2003 for space in the suburbs that’s a fraction of its current footprint.
It’s the latest sign of an office market shakeup triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A source familiar with the matter said BMC Compuware, which is now owned by Houston-based BMC Software Inc. after a June 2020 acquisition, has not renewed its lease in the 1.3 million-square-foot trophy building at 1000 Woodward Ave. that today is called One Campus Martius.
That lease is for 58,000 square feet, according to CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, DC-based real estate information service.
Another source briefed on the matter said Compuware is taking about 10,000 square feet in the 2000 Town Center high-rise in the Southfield Town Center office complex off the John C. Lodge Freeway/M-10.
Peter Karmanos Jr., who co-founded Compuware in 1973, moved the company from Farmington Hills to the new downtown Detroit building, which cost some $350 million to build. It was a major employment victory for the city at the time and not long after, another new office building was built nearby and Dan Gilbert began buying up old buildings, ushering in a renewed corporate interest in downtown.
Emails were sent to BMC seeking comment on Friday, Monday and Wednesday. Dan Gilbert’s Detroit-based Bedrock LLC, which owns One Campus Martius, declined comment Tuesday.
Transwestern manages the Southfield Town Center on behalf of New York City-based 601W Cos., which paid $177.5 million for the complex — the region’s largest — in 2014. Transwestern declined comment.
A representative for Cushman & Wakefield, which has a local office in Southfield and represents BMC, also declined to comment Monday. Messages were left with 601W Cos. executive Tuesday.
In recent months, Deloitte LLP shed its large Renaissance Center office in favor of about 35,000 square feet of WeWork Inc. co-working space at 1001 Woodward, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is moving a chunk of its people from the RenCen as well. And last week, WeWork announced it was shuttering a location of its own, this one in the TechTown neighborhood at 6001 Cass Ave.
The move also comes less than a month after Meridian Health, which is owned by St. Louis-based Centene Corp., put all 266,000 of its square feet in One Campus Martius on the sixth, seventh, 14th and 15th floors up for sublease.
