TowneBank and Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) have finalized the purchase of the Norfolk Southern Tower at 3 Commercial Place in downtown Norfolk as well as the adjoining Commercial Place parking garage at 520 East Main Street owned by the City of Norfolk. Closing on both the office tower acquisition and the garage occurred simultaneously on June 23. While TowneBank and CHKD now jointly own the tower and the garage and will share the space equally, Norfolk Southern will continue to occupy several of the floors until the end of 2021.
“TowneBank and CHKD are both respected corporate citizens and assets to our community,” says Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander. “Their significant investment reinforces Norfolk’s downtown as the urban employment hub of the region.” Alexander is pleased that nearly 900 people will eventually work in the tower, several hundred more than are presently there from Norfolk Southern.
Upon termination of the Norfolk Southern lease, the building will house the headquarters of Towne Financial Services which will include approximately 400 team members in TowneBank Mortgage, Towne Insurance and Towne Benefits. The bank’s headquarters will remain in the Harbour View area of Suffolk and TowneBank’s Norfolk Main Office and Corporate Banking Group will remain in their current downtown locations.
“We have been looking for a way to bring the Towne Financial Services Executives and Operations Teams together under one roof and had been exploring numerous locations throughout the region,” says G. Robert Aston, Jr., Chairman of TowneBank. “In 2018, when Norfolk Southern announced its plans to relocate, the opportunity to purchase their iconic building was too good to pass up.”
Consistent with TowneBank’s commitment to the community, TowneBank will donate the net proceeds of Norfolk Southern’s lease payments through 2021 to CHKD’s current campaign to build a mental health hospital for children on its Norfolk campus.
CHKD ultimately plans to relocate approximately 475 members of its workforce into the downtown building, including information services, patient financial services, Human Resources and Health System administration.
While the downtown tower will not include any direct patient-care services, Jim Dahling, CHKD President and CEO says, “This opportunity allows us to move office functions out of our on-campus clinical buildings so that we can repurpose those spaces to better serve the children of our community. And, we are able to realize long-term efficiencies as we eliminate leased office spaces in the community,” Dahling continued. “The decision to jointly own this building represents the most time-sensitive and cost-effective solution to critical space shortages for both our patients and our staff, including expediting our ability to bring much-needed mental health services to children in advance of the opening of our new mental health hospital and outpatient services tower in 2022.”
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About TowneBank:
As one of the top community banks in Virginia and North Carolina, TowneBank operates 42 banking offices serving Chesapeake, Chesterfield County, Glen Allen, Hampton, James City County, Mechanicsville, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Richmond, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, and York County in Virginia, along with Raleigh, Cary, Charlotte, Greensboro, Greenville, Moyock, Grandy, Camden County, Southern Shores, Corolla, Duck and Nags Head in North Carolina. TowneBank also offers a full range of financial services through its controlled divisions and subsidiaries that include Towne Investment Group, Towne Wealth Management, Towne Insurance Agency, Towne Benefits, TowneBank Mortgage, TowneBank Commercial Mortgage, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Towne Realty, Towne 1031 Exchange, LLC, and Towne Vacations. Local decision-making is a hallmark of its hometown banking strategy that is delivered through the leadership of each group’s President and Board of Directors.
With total assets of $12.62 billion as of March 31, 2020, TowneBank is one of the largest banks headquartered in Virginia.
About CHKD:
CHKD is Virginia’s only freestanding children’s hospital and serves the medical and surgical needs of children throughout greater Hampton Roads, the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and northeastern North Carolina. The not-for-profit CHKD Health System operates primary care pediatric practices, surgical practices, multi-service health centers, urgent care centers, and satellite offices throughout its service region. In 2019, CHKD broke ground on a 60-bed, 14-story mental health hospital and outpatient center on its Norfolk campus to address the mental health crisis facing our youth. The new tower is scheduled to open in 2022.
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