Capital One Giving New Life To Two Innsbrook Office Buildings

Capital One is buying two buildings in Innsbrook for a possible call center and operations center. The two buildings, located on Wheat First Drive, total about 200,000 square feet and are close to Capital One’s Knolls campus. The credit card company is under contract, according to local sources, and the deal is imminent. Downtown Short Pump […]

August 6, 2010; 8:29 AM • by Aaron Kremer

Capital One is buying two buildings in Innsbrook for a possible call center and operations center. The two buildings, located on Wheat First Drive, total about 200,000 square feet and are close to Capital One’s Knolls campus. The credit card company is under contract, according to local sources, and the deal is imminent.

Downtown Short Pump news partner Richmond BizSense could not learn the price by deadline, but that will be public once the deal closes.

“Initial plans call for operations and call center functions to occupy the new space sometime in the second half of 2011,” wrote Shelley Solheim, a spokeswoman for Capital One, in an email with BizSense. “It’s too early to quantify future demand,” she wrote, meaning it’s unclear how many employees might eventually work in the buildings. However, buildings of that size could handle upward of 1,500 workers.

The facilities were built in the late 1980s for Wheat First Securities, which was purchased by Wachovia Securities. They have been vacant since Wachovia Securities moved its headquarters to St. Louis after a merger with A.G. Edwards. First State Street Invest 3300 bought the 22-acre campus in 2005 for $18.8 million.

Once occupied, the deal will help bring down the vacancy rate at Innsbrook, which stood at 25 percent in the second quarter of 2010, the highest for any submarket in the Richmond region, according to a quartlery market report produced by Thalhimer. The Central Business District had a vacancy rate of 14.6 percent, according to the same report.

Capital One is the second largest employer in Richmond behind VCU. The company had about 6,800 full-time workers in 2010.

August 6, 2010 8:29 AM 0