Founded here 30 years ago, the wood products company keeps its headquarters in the 26-story Fox Tower, the city's newest Downtown office building, where it leases six-and-a-half floors and employs about 160 people. As part of a major restructuring, the company said in July it was considering a move to one of three southern cities in order to bring its corporate headquarters closer to the company's mills and customers. It said Tuesday that Nashiville would be its new home. Charlotte, NC and Richmond, VA were its other two options.
L-P tells GlobeSt.com it will vacate over the next 12 to 15 months four of the six-and-a-half floors it has committed to lease in Fox Tower through 2011 for an average rate that local brokers tell GlobeSt.com is in the low-to-mid-$20s per sf per year.
The company already this year subleased one of its floors--the eighth floor--to a law firm, and recently hired David Reinhart and Chris Elsenbach of CRESA Partners/Portland to sublease the 7,000 sf it leases on the seventh floor. The annual full service asking rate for the space is $20 per sf. The company tells GlobeSt.com it will ultimately consolidate operations onto three floors, which means two more floors will come to the sublease market.
"Our people enjoy living in Portland," says Mark Suwyn, L-P chairman and chief executive officer. "While there will be various positions that will transition over time to our new headquarters in Nashville, we will retain approximately 130 (of 210) positions in the Portland area and are developing plans to move approximately 15 additional positions to the Northwest as part of the overall consolidation."
Additionally, L-P says it will consolidate employees from other administrative offices to its new headquarters in Nashville. In addition to the metro area, L-P currently has administrative offices in Hayden Lake, ID; Conroe, TX; Charlotte, NC; Montreal, QC; Schaumburg, IL; and Troy, MI. "The impact on our various administrative offices will differ by location," said Suwyn. "Some will see minimal impact while others will consolidate in greater numbers to the new headquarters. We are in the process of communicating the extent of these changes to our employees."
The company tells GlobeSt.com it hasn't yet nailed down space in Nashville, but ultimately will consolidate 180 people to Nashville. Nancy Petrusich of CRESA/Portland tells GlobeSt.com it plans to lease office space for the headquarters, hanger space for its flight department and space for research and development activities.
L-P has changed significantly since it announced a divestiture and debt reduction program in May 2002. The company has sold approximately one-third of its businesses and is in the process of selling off the last of its timberland as well as eight lumber mills and two hardboard plants, mostly located in the Northwest. L-P is abandoning its lumber business in favor of plastic building products and oriented strand board, which has been taking market share from plywood.
Continue Reading for Free
Register and gain access to:
- Breaking commercial real estate news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical coverage of the property casualty insurance and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, PropertyCasualty360 and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
