COURTESY / THE DUNHAM GROUP
RLC Engineering in Hallowell expanded to a lease at 1 Cumberland Place in Bangor to accommodate a growing clientele in northern Maine.
Updated: June 6, 2023
Hallowell engineering firm eyes northern Maine market with expansion to Bangor
COURTESY / THE DUNHAM GROUP
Redeveloped as a Class A office building, 1 Cumberland Place started life as a freight terminal in 1947.
An engineering consulting firm based in Hallowell was recently moving furniture into a leased space in Bangor in order to accommodate a growing clientele in northern Maine.
Rick Conant, president and owner of RLC Engineering, leased 6,783 square feet of office space at 1 Cumberland place from MRM Realty.
TC Haffenreffer and Sylas Hatch from the Dunham Group brokered the deal.
Built in 1947, 1 Cumberland Place was a former Fox & Ginn Movers Inc. freight terminal.
A development company, Cumberland Partners, bought it in 1988 and undertook a project to redevelop the building as a Class A office building, which included adding a third story and new exterior, and reconfiguring the interior as an office complex.
In 2020, Haffenreffer and Hatch brokered an off-market sale of 1 Cumberland Place for $3.1 million.
They brokered the next sale of the building, also an off-market play, in 2022, to the current owner, Christopher Leahy of MRM Realty, who bought it for $4.05 million.
In addition to RLC Engineering, other recent tenants include Quest Diagnostics and Red Door Title.
“The right office real estate still seems to be strong in Bangor,” said Haffenreffer.
Conant grew up in Turner and has over 30 years of experience in the electric utility industry. He founded RLC Engineering, with six employees, in 2006 in Augusta as an engineering consulting firm offering services in the electric utility and renewable generation engineering fields.
Courtesy / RLC Engineering
RLC Engineering’s sign is up at 1 Cumberland Place in Bangor.
In 2012, he moved the business to a building he bought at 267 Whitten Road in Hallowell.
“At the time, we had about 20 to 25 people,” he said. “We thought Hallowell would have all kinds of room for growth. We quickly found we were outgrowing Hallowell.”
Many of the firm’s employees were in southern Maine. So he opened a branch in a leased space in Falmouth. Occupying about 5,000 square feet and accommodating just over 20 employees, the firm started outgrowing the Falmouth space within a couple of years.
Courtesy / RLC Engineering
Courtesy / RLC Engineering
“So we started looking for another office,” he said.
In the fall of 2020, he bought 176 Gannett Drive in South Portland, waited for existing leases to expire, performed renovations, and opened that office this past April to accommodate 75 to 80 employees. Conant closed the Falmouth office and moved those employees to the South Portland location.
“As I’m doing that project, I also really wanted to grow in northern Maine, near our customers and some of the projects we work on there,” he said. “We do a lot of work on renewable energy projects and some of our other departments were picking up employees who were closer to Bangor. So it made sense to look for a space in Bangor.”
The firm now has about 110 employees across its northern, central and southern Maine offices and plans to continue growing.
Conant credited Haffenreffer for finding the right space. Advantages included proximity to the downtown and walkability to restaurants and other amenities. There’s good parking and potential room to grow in the building.
“It’s a nice location,” he said.
Clients range from electric utilities, regional grid operators, renewable energy developers and contractors of electric grid infrastructure projects across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast and eastern Canada.
Drivers of the company’s growth include the need for infrastructure and development of renewable energy projects, both in the Northeast and across the U.S.
“We’re in a very good position, with a growing market and need for services like ours in this industry,” Conant said. “We’ve developed a good reputation and credibility with customers and with developers of renewable projects. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
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