news-record.com

GREENSBORO - New office buildings downtown are about as rare as platinum medals at the Olympics.

But that will change next month when Carolina Bank opens its new corporate headquarters at 101 N. Spring St. between West Friendly Avenue and West Market Street.

At $6.4 million, the four-story building certainly won't impact the city's skyline, but downtown officials don't mind.

"We're clearly excited to have them come," said Ed Wolverton, president and CEO of Downtown Greensboro Inc. "And bringing a financial headquarters to downtown is very important."

The bank building will be the first office structure to go up in the center city since 2000. That was also a financial building, the SunTrust Bank, a 60,000-square-foot, five-story structure on North Greene Street.

The long construction drought can be blamed on a number of factors, observers say.

Those include an emphasis on rehabbing existing buildings, the high cost and limited availability of downtown sites, difficult economic conditions and the growth of Green Valley Office Park.

"First and foremost it is Green Valley," said Rob Johnston, president of Johnston Properties , which owns the SunTrust building.

"They have built hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space in the last 15 years. Greensboro is only so big and can only absorb so much," Johnston said.

Carolina Bank officials seriously considered five locations, only one of which was downtown.

"We wanted to be part of the downtown renaissance," said Bob Braswell, the bank's president. "We felt it would make a statement that we intended to be Greensboro's bank."

Carolina officials say they plan an informal opening late next month and a grand opening Oct. 4.
Construction of the 44,000-square-foot building began in October.

Initially, Carolina will bring 50 workers downtown, but that number will increase as the bank grows, Braswell said. H e's looking for a tenant to occupy the fourth floor.

"It's been looked at," he said, "but we haven't found the right folks yet."

The new building will allow Carolina to consolidate its corporate staff, which is now split between a branch on Lawndale Drive and the current administrative headquarters at 528 College Road.

That building, which contains nearly 10,000 square feet of space, is for sale.

The downtown location will be the bank's fourth in Greensboro.

It also has a branch in Asheboro , Burlington and High Point and a loan production office in Winston-Salem, where a branch is planned for late next year.

The bank opened in 1996 .

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com