Insurer to move into Bank of America Plaza

Downtown gets a nice boost at the expense of Elm Hill Pike

Email | Print By Kyle Swenson

Pennsylvania-based Harleysville Insurance is packing up its local operations on Elm Hill Pike and moving into the Bank of America Plaza downtown, NashvillePost.com has learned.

The deal is a welcome boost for downtown's office market, which had a 19 percent vacancy rate at the end of September, the second-highest among all of the region's submarkets. Harleysville has contracted DWC Construction to rehab almost the entire 14th floor – 18,292 square feet – of BofA Plaza. The work is expected to cost $370,000. David McDonnell, the company's resident vice president, said the work will kick off late this year.

“It will be a staged move beginning by December 31,” McDonnell said.

A property casualty insurer, Harleysville opened its Nashville office in 1994 to serve Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. The company now employs about 100 people locally, according to McDonnell. The staff has been split between two locations on Elm Hill, but the new location will combine the two groups.

According to Rob Gage, a Colliers Turley Martin Tucker broker helping lease BofA Plaza, Harleysville has subleased its space for six years from Louisiana-Pacific Corp., which has been retrenching in recent years as the housing market has cratered.

Details of the lease are not being made public, but a recent Colliers report listed the 14th-floor space at $14.75 per square foot. At that rate, the deal is worth $1.6 million over the life of the lease.