1-800 Contacts renews 125,000-square-foot lease at its Draper headquarters

DRAPER — 1-800 Contacts renewed its lease on 125,000 square feet at 261 Data Drive in the Vista Station complex, one of the three largest office transactions of the third quarter in the Salt Lake City-Provo market, the Draper Herald reported, citing CBRE's quarterly office data 2.

The other two largest deals were a confidential 218,000-square-foot renewal on the edge of the central business district and Pattern's 141,000-square-foot renewal and expansion in Lehi, according to the same report 2.

CBRE vice president Phil Brierley presented the data at the Urban Land Institute's Trends conference at the Hyatt Regency in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Oct. 20 1. Brierley leads the firm's capital markets team for office and industrial sales in Utah 1.

The market-wide vacancy rate is 21.8 percent, down 80 basis points from the second quarter and 140 basis points from a year earlier, and total availability, which counts space coming open in the next six months, fell to 23.1 percent, its lowest level since early 2023 1. Brierley told the conference the average misleads: more than half the area's office buildings are at least 90 percent leased, most of the empty space sits in roughly 30 percent of buildings, and vacancy in prime buildings near downtown is 6.5 percent 1. "The truth is that the Salt Lake office market isn't really about the averages," he said 1.

The market absorbed 161,000 square feet in the quarter, the eighth consecutive quarter of positive absorption, and the 2026 total of 577,000 square feet is already more than the 488,000 absorbed in all of 2025 1. Tenants signed 1.52 million square feet of leases in the quarter, 29 percent above the five-year quarterly average, and buildings in the top class took 74 percent of that volume 2.

For the third consecutive quarter CBRE counted no office projects under construction in the market; at the 2020 peak, 16 projects totaling nearly 2.9 million square feet were underway 2. New space needs rents of about $60 per square foot, triple net, to pencil out, against top rents around $35 2. Utah has lost 4.4 percent of its office stock over two years, about 2.4 million square feet, to conversions and owner-users buying buildings 2.

Average asking rent for top-class space downtown reached $40.08 per square foot, full-service gross, up 10.9 percent from a year earlier, and asking rents at a few of the best buildings passed $50 for the first time 2. Brierley predicted 2026 will likely be the best year for that class of leasing the market has had, and told developers the rents needed to justify new towers are "coming faster than we think" 2.

With no new buildings on the way, CBRE expects tenants to be limited to renewing in place or taking existing vacant space, the position 1-800 Contacts is in at Vista Station 2. The company is owned by the private equity firm KKR through its parent company SeekWell 2.