With Canal Insurance Co.’s move to Greenville’s 101 N. Main building, the company and the building have become emblematic of a broader shift in the calculus companies use to determine where to locate and how building owners are responding to meet those needs.
At the heart of things
The Canal Building, as it is now known thanks to exclusive signage rights granted to the company, is the anchor of ONE City Plaza and is effectively at the epicenter of Greenville’s dynamic downtown.
As an 84-year-old company born and based in Greenville, Canal had outgrown its previous headquarters building on East Stone Avenue and needed upgraded space, according to President and CEO Paul Brocklebank.
COVID and the ensuing shift to a hybrid work model underscored the vital importance of Canal’s employees to the firm’s success, Brocklebank says, and this understanding figured prominently in the company’s decisions regarding what and where their new space needed to be.
“Timing is sometimes everything,” Brocklebank says.
What was an uncertain, even scary real estate environment before the pandemic was now shifting, in no small part thanks to disruptions throughout the lockdown period, to open up opportunities that might not have been available before.
Working with building owner RealOp Investments and CBRE, along with the city of Greenville, Canal secured 65,000 square feet of completely redesigned office space on five floors of the building at the heart of downtown.
“There’s just been an exponential impact on morale,” Brocklebank says.
Creating an attractive work environment and engaging employees throughout the transition were part of the company’s efforts to prioritize recruitment and retention of its most valuable asset — its people.
Taking advantage of a competitive leasing environment, the move and the upgrade afforded the company the chance to involve employees in design choices. This helped them to become that much more vested in the move and the company’s future, according to Laura Beth Medley, vice president and chief human resources and corporate communications officer.
She and Brocklebank say the company’s move to the new building in December has offered only a glimpse of what the location will mean for the company and its employees.
“I doubt that we really appreciate the full scope of what this building will bring,” Medley says.
Downtown energy
Being at the heart of downtown Greenville with its vibrancy and palpable energy is one of the key reasons the Canal building has gone from a 40% occupancy rate during the pandemic to over 80% now, according to CBRE’s Blaine Hart.
Hart says that despite what pandemic disruptions and economic shifts have meant for office buildings in much of the rest of the country, Greenville’s attractiveness to new residents and companies has kept demand for office space comparatively high.
This fact combined with the departure of two long-term tenants early in the pandemic created the opportunity to give 101 N. Main a major redesign.
Hart and RealOp Investments’ Chip Hunt say this chance to reconfigure the building made it attractive for new and existing tenants.
And, of course, the building’s central location undergirds all of the other reasons tenants chose to call it home.
“From a macro perspective you look at bigger companies, and market trends can be dictated by geography,” Hart says.
Hunt adds one of Greenville’s competitive advantages is its highly developed sense of place.
“That’s why people want to be in this building downtown,” he says.
With CBRE research data for 4th quarter 2022 indicating office vacancy rates hovering around 3%, Hart says he expects 2023 to bring announcements for new office building projects in the Greenville-Spartanburg market.
“We are going to need more space to meet anticipated growth,” he says.
