Carey School leasing space in Legg’s Harbor East building 

Posted: 1:06 pm Tue, November 17, 2009
By Robbie Whelan
Daily Record Business Writer

Starting next year, students at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School will walk to class alongside the equities analysts and fund managers whose jobs they are training for.

Carey School officials announced Tuesday that they would be leasing some 80,000 square feet of space in the new Legg Mason headquarters building in Harbor East.

The business school will occupy the first two floors of the building, with academic and administrative offices on the 12th and 13th floors. The school’s lease will last for 10 years, with a 10-year renewal option.

The school will relocate from the 35,000-square-foot Downtown Center building at Charles and Fayette streets, a glass-enclosed building with a recognizable electronic news ticker running around the outside, which was designed by Baltimore architecture firm Ziger/Snead LLP and opened in 2001.

Details on what Hopkins is paying for the space were not immediately available, but a broker told The Daily Record this year that space is going for $38.50 per square foot for the 140,000 square feet not occupied by Legg. It is unknown how much Legg is paying for the remaining 325,000 square feet of the building.

Michael Beatty, president of H&S Development Corp., the company that led the development of the Harbor East neighborhood, including the Legg tower, would not discuss leasing rates, but said the building “does command the highest rents in town and always will.” He added that half of the Carey School’s 80,000 square feet will be leased directly from H&S and the other half subleased from Legg.

“From an image point of view, the entire podium of the building will feel like the Carey Business School. They’ll have their own prominent entrance and a lobby within a lobby,” Beatty said. “From a student experience, it’s incredible. You’ll have this phenomenal educational experience. … You’ve all the things that it takes other institutions years and years to build up.”

Beatty said his company had been courting the Carey School for more than a year, and eight months ago, he sent an e-mail to its dean, Yash Gupta, outlining his vision for having a globally focused MBA program located in his building, with access to the hotels, boutiques and restaurants of Harbor East.

“Whenever you have so many students around, it helps the restaurants, the shops, the accommodations, it adds intellectual vigor to the area,” Gupta said. “We want to be able to have new and exciting things going on in the markets for students to learn. We want students to intern with the companies.”

Gupta said several Legg employees already teach at the Carey School as part-time faculty, and noted that Legg Mason CEO Mark R. Fetting is on the school’s board of directors.

The 24-story building, which opened in the spring, saw the Baltimore-based money manager move in starting this past summer, leaving its old headquarters at 100 Light Street after a decade there.

City officials have praised the move as smart business retention, with 1,000 jobs remaining in the city, although Legg Mason downsized last year, letting go of 565 employees in September.

In addition to Legg Mason, whose lease is for 380,000 square feet, the law firm Hogan & Hartson rents 40,000 square feet in the tower, and financial firm Oppenheimer & Co. rents about 7,000 square feet, with an option to double their space. Beatty said that with the addition of Carey, the tower’s occupancy rate is about 85 percent.

William P. Carey, a Baltimore native who owns a large real estate asset management firm and whose ancestry contains original members of the city’s government, gave Hopkins $50 million in 2008 to start a stand-alone business school.

On Oct. 21, the school officially inaugurated its full-time MBA program, which begins next year, with a ceremony at the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange.

About 80 full-time MBA students and 500 part-time evening and weekend students will begin classes in August of next year.