Life Time Living at The Exchange Raleigh stacks 289 luxury apartments on top of an 80,000-square-foot athletic club and caps the whole thing with a rooftop beach club. Life Time and local developer Dewitt Carolinas broke ground on the 20-story tower Oct. 29, 2026, kicking off Phase Two of The Exchange Raleigh, a $1 billion, 40-acre mixed-use district in Midtown Raleigh. The partners say they’ll invest more than $200 million in the building, and Consigli Construction is the construction manager.
Raleigh is a smaller metro than most of the brand’s markets. Life Time Living opened in Coral Gables, Fla., in 2021, then added locations in Las Vegas, Stamford and the Boston area.
Project Scope
The club fills the lower floors. It runs four levels with studios for barre, Pilates, yoga, reformer and high-intensity training, plus strength and cardio floors, recovery and massage rooms, a coworking lounge, a LifeCafe and a Kids Academy. The roof carries a 40,000-square-foot beach club with a leisure pool, a six-lane lap pool and four pickleball courts.
Apartments range from 610 to 2,040 square feet. Residents get covered parking with EV charging, a golf and game simulator room and a private dining room, along with club access. Rule Joy Trammell + Rubio, the Atlanta architecture firm, lists the project in its portfolio and produced the design renderings.
The program has grown since it was first pitched in 2024. Early plans filed with the city showed an 18-story building with 241 units at roughly $107 million in construction cost. The tower that broke ground is two floors taller, has 48 more units and roughly doubles the stated investment. The team is targeting NGBS Green and Fitwel certification and plans delivery in the fourth quarter of 2028.
Putting deep pool basins, pickleball courts and a lap pool on a high-rise roof isn’t a light structural ask. Neither is wrapping a big-box fitness club inside a residential podium, where long spans for open gym floors have to give way to the tighter column grid apartments prefer.
Why It Matters
This is a fitness operator using its club as the amenity package for a rental tower, and that changes the leasing math. Residents are buying a membership with their lease. Life Time gets a captive member base, and the developer gets an amenity no competitor in Raleigh can match.
The Exchange needed it. Dewitt Carolinas’ master plan calls for up to 990,000 square feet of office, up to 1,275 homes, 300 hotel rooms and 125,000 square feet of retail around four acres of park, and the 1000 Social office tower is due in 2028. A tower full of residents who don’t have to leave the building to work out, eat or work gives that office space a ready-made neighborhood.
Project Team & Details
| Developer | Dewitt Carolinas |
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| Owner / Client | Life Time and Dewitt Carolinas |
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| Architect | Rule Joy Trammell + Rubio |
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| General Contractor | Consigli Construction (Construction Manager) |
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| Status | Under Construction |
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| Sustainability Certification | NGBS Green and Fitwel (targeted) |
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| Funding Source | Private |
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