September 2024 City Scoop: St. Louis
City Grill
Tyler Meyr
Executive Director and Part of the Leadership Team
Lamar Johnson Collaborative
“Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC) is seeing three trends at play in the St. Louis market,” Meyr says. “The first is that downtown and suburban St. Louis has not refilled office space since the pandemic. The nearby city of Clayton submarket has strong pricing and demand, but the overall corporate market remains challenging. The second trend, and a driving force in the St. Louis construction market, has been institutional investment. All local universities are currently investing in building facilities to attract and retain talent. And third, there’s always uncertainty around an election year and, with interest rates remaining elevated, project starts have slowed down. Once some of that uncertainty is settled, interest rates come down and inflation stabilizes as expected, developers currently planning projects can decide whether to start. A lot of early-stage planning is happening as our clients evaluate the St. Louis market, which creates opportunities for LJC as designers to be ready to move forward on projects once conditions become more favorable.”
LJC was founded in 1999 and has 350 employees.
Rising prices impact LJC as a design firm. One of the ways we can address this is through our integrated-by-design approach, which leverages the various disciplines within our company, including master planning, architecture and interiors. LJC is also positioned within the larger Clayco Enterprise to collaborate on the development, construction and engineering side of things, allowing us to adjust to evolving market conditions and business opportunities. While our collective integrated delivery approach is an attractive proposition, each of the individual entities has the ability to work on their own projects, which affords us a degree of flexibility. This diversity of projects and the ability to work on a project at various stages of the planning process is one of LJC’s strengths.
