Real estate notes: New training facility for manufacturing HQ

T.W. Frierson Contractor Inc. will soon begin work on a 26,000-square-foot stand-alone training facility for heavy equipment manufacturer Wirtgen America in Antioch.

Wayne Evans, Wirtgen’s vice president of business development – pavement technology, said the project on Dana Way east of Interstate 24 will double his company’s capacity to train dealers and others in its network. Currently, the company hosts between 30 and 50 people per week at its plant.

“The work is more technical these days and there is a labor shortage,” he said. “There is a need to do more.”

Frierson’s work is worth almost $3.1 million, but Evans said there are additional costs involved in preparing the project. The building, which is expected to wrap up late this year, will house two lecture classrooms and two lab-type rooms – each with the capacity for 50 people – as well as a 5,000-square-foot showroom, a dining area and a four-bay shop facility.

Evans said his company’s paving, recycling and reclaiming products, which are made in Germany and sell for between $400,000 and $600,000 each, command 70 percent of the U.S. market. Wirtgen employs about 50 people in Antioch and another 100 elsewhere in North America.

Money manager bolts for Brentwood

The local office of Strategic Financial Partners, a Memphis-based financial planning firm, will at the end of this month move from downtown’s Fifth Third Center to a Duke Realty building in Maryland Farms.

Strategic Financial’s local staff of 10 will move into about 2,500 square feet at Creekside Crossing IV, one of four Duke sites on Cadillac Way between Old Hickory Boulevard and Maryland Way. District Manager Eric Bubrig said the move gives his firm, which markets investments, insurance and employee benefit products, a fresh start in better designed space that gives his team easier access to more parts of town.

Bubrig said he expects to hire three or four people this year on the back of a projected 10 percent jump in production. Strategic Financial also has offices in Jackson and Knoxville and employs a total of 100 people.

Coleman Aycock represented Duke in the move. He said Creekside IV is now about 45 percent occupied, with other tenants including Dunn Southeast Construction, Parsons Engineering and Jetstream Financial as well as CrawfordSpalding Group, the newly launched turnaround firm led by former Caremark CEO Mac Crawford.

“The traffic (of potential tenants) never slowed down, but the size of the space people were looking for did,” said Aycock of the brick-by-brick leasing at Creekside IV. “That seemed to be the market when the building was completed and we’ve capitalized on what was there.”

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