Real estate notes: Fifth Third growing downtown

Also: Office furniture company moving to the Village

Email | Print By Geert De Lombaerde

Fifth Third Bank is adding to its footprint downtown. Middle Tennessee’s sixth-largest bank by deposits – and one of the nation’s top 15 by assets – will in June move into the entire fifth floor of the 31-story building that bears its name.

The expansion will add 13,600 square feet to Fifth Third’s footprint and gives it three full floors in the 490,000-square-foot building. Among those moving onto the fifth floor will be a number of people the bank had moved to its area branches to cope with its space needs in its sixth- and seventh-floor offices.

Fifth Third, which entered Middle Tennessee in 2004 when it bought Franklin National Bank, now has about 30 branches and 345 people in the area. The bank last week filed with regulators to open another office on Nolensville Pike just south of Old Hickory Boulevard.

The Fifth Third Center is owned by Denver-based Amstar, which bought the property in late 2006 from an investment group that included several locals. The Fifth Third deal will help Amstar cope with the emptying of about 75,000 square feet of space that had been leased by SunTrust Bank and Stites & Harbison, which both moved down the street to Eakin Partners’ SunTrust Plaza.

Overhaul for Village building

Office furniture dealer Facility Planners Inc. will next month move to Hillsboro Village from Cummins Station.

President and CEO Nancy Leach has signed a seven-year lease for 7,300 square feet at 1901 21st Ave. S., the building at the corner of 21st and Acklen Avenue. The move comes less than two years after Facility Planners relocated from the Doctors Building on Church – now a Homewood Suites hotel – to Cummins Station.

Several years ago, Leach signed a deal with Crosland, the developers of the Terrazzo condo tower in the Gulch, to take up a good chunk of ground-floor space there. But she says delays at that $68 million project forced her to look elsewhere.

The 1901 21st building formerly housed some of the operations of Modern Red SchoolHouse, a nationally active nonprofit that works with school systems on professional development. Modern Red SchoolHouse will stay in 1903 21st Ave. S. and share bathrooms with the 1901 building. Harvest Construction is handling the roughly $200,000 rehab.

Facility Planners, which employs a dozen people, markets the Teknion line of office furniture in much of Tennessee. The company booked $4 million in revenue last year and has recently worked with Mars Petcare, CMT and Fresenius Medical, which bought Renal Care Group Inc. in 2005.