Charlotte-based Park Sterling Corporation signed a lease last week for a new Greenville office that will serve as the regional headquarters for Park Sterling Bank. The 15,000-square-foot space at 617 E. McBee Ave. is an important step in securing the bank’s foothold in the Upstate, said Dixon Harrill, Upstate South Carolina president of Park Sterling Bank.
“I’m excited that after a year and a half of saying we need more here, the company is investing in us having a nice facility at the end of the year and hiring a couple of key people here and there to make that happen,” he said. “This building gives us something we don’t have in that we’ve got a good location now, but nobody really knows where we are except our customers.”
Nor does the current downtown location offer full-service banking. Harrill said the headquarters will allow the bank to consolidate some of its Greenville operations. An asset-based lending group and special assets group now located in a 1,600-square-foot space on Woodruff Road will relocate downtown, and some mortgage officers also might move to the new space. All retail branches will stay open.
The new headquarters will house the Commercial Bankers, Treasury Services, Wealth Management, Mortgage Operations, Special Assets, Asset-Based Lending and Loan Review teams, as well as a state-of-the art Retail branch to service residential and business customers.
Renovations are expected to be complete by the end of the year.
Harrill said it will serve as the headquarters for the area from the Midlands to the Upstate, noting that 28 of the bank’s 52 branches will be in the Upstate. The bank’s other regions are Charlotte, Gastonia, Raleigh and Charleston.
“We have been growing throughout our system on the deposit side, loans growing on the metro side. In smaller areas there’s been slight shrinkage, but if we can keep the smaller markets kind of flat [and] can grow in the Greenville, Anderson and Clemson markets, also Charlotte, Gastonia, Richmond and Raleigh, then we will be very successful.”
Park Sterling’s recent expansions in South Carolina include the acquisition of Capital Bank with locations in Clinton, Anderson and Newberry. Earlier this month Park Sterling announced its acquisition of Provident Community, which had nine offices in South Carolina including two offices in Simpsonville and Laurens. Park Sterling has $2.3 billion in assets and 52 banking offices in the Carolinas, north Georgia and Richmond, Va., areas.
