Overview
NASA Federal Credit Union is growing quickly and needed additional space for our expanding staff. We were seeking a five-year growth solution to afford the time needed to assess our 10- to 20-year growth goals and facility needs. The solution was needed within 12 months. This is a very short time horizon to locate, purchase, design and build. We began a search in a very challenging local market.
Finding a location close to our main office would be operationally efficient for our maintenance teams and we would not lose employees due to relocation. Strategically, it was our intent to move our mortgage operations center, title company and a separate retail branch to this new location. Our mortgage operations center and title company needed a higher visibility in the community to generate business opportunities.
The current location was in an out-of-the-way business park. Relocating the retail branch would help to drive traffic to the new location. We found the perfect building, but it was not for sale. The building was partially renovated, meaning it was a 15,000-square-foot shell with an owner-occupant taking up approximately 2,000 square feet and looking to rent the rest.
We began a difficult sale negotiation, which took several months. Evaluating the value of the building was a difficult, time-consuming process. The deal was finalized, and the engineering and permitting process began. The previous owner had not obtained the proper building permits with the county, parks and planning, and city; had performed substandard work and had numerous code violations. All these had to be sorted out with the respective authorities and resolved before we could begin build-out.
In addition, the owner-occupant refused to vacate the premises as called for in his temporary leaseback. More legal wrangling took place to persuade the owner-occupant to vacate. Many meetings had to be held with authorities to close out old permits from the previous owner, cure code violations from the previous owner, and meet the new requirements set forth by the county and parks and planning. This required relationship building with authorities that were already frustrated by previous owner’s lack of integrity.
After eight months of resolving all these issues, build-out began. We were left with a very tight buildout timeline — less than four months. Our facility director had the foresight to work in parallel the permitting, engineering and design to ensure he could keep the timeline. Our build-out went very smoothly and was completed on time and within budget with all county, parks and planning, and city inspections passing.
The moves went superbly. The mortgage operations center and title company moved from the main office, approximately 40 employees. All the logistics of mail pick-up and delivery, cleaning crew, back-up generator, landscaping, smart keys/locks, security cameras, data lines, phone lines, banking equipment installations, signage and branding were coordinated as scheduled. Approximately 10 employees from a nearby retail branch moved to the new location. We ended a branch office lease that was literally 300 yards away from the new location, saving several hundred thousand dollars in annual rent, and moving the branch to the new location was not an inconvenience to our customers. The new location can be seen from the highway, providing more exposure to our brand.
In-house Participants
Thomas Conroy, Project Manager; Andrew Mayer, sr. facilities technician; Nicholas Fields, maintenance technician; Douglas Nahas, vice president of retail services; Kristal Ribblett, assistant vice president of branch operations; William White, vice president of real estate lending; Ron Cage, assistant vice president of technology services; Robert Hyde, security and fraud prevention manager
