The 35-story PNC Center on East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue in Downtown Cleveland is about to get more full. Not only are parts of it now up for lease, but PNC will soon relocate more office workers into the building from satellite locations it leases in Greater Cleveland (NEOtrans). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM.
Hundreds of office workers may relocate
When a big company like PNC Bank owns a large, underutilized office property and occupies leased office properties in the same metropolitan area, something’s got to give. The giver is reportedly PNC’s satellite offices. And the receiver is PNC Center in Downtown Cleveland.
According to sources who spoke to NEOtrans on the condition of anonymity, PNC executives have reportedly adopted a policy for its Greater Cleveland office spaces — move employees from rented offices to PNC-owned offices. The satellite offices include those in Brecksville and possibly in Cleveland’s West Park.
The Pittsburgh-based bank has multiple vacant floors to fill in its 35-story tower, PNC Center, 1900 E. 9th St. downtown. But not for long. Their vacancy is to be addressed in two different ways.
The first is by PNC office workers. A construction permit is being issued by the city’s Building Department for an $8 million interior demolition of floors 5-7 and 9, to be followed by their renovation. The renovation work is almost certain to be of a greater dollar amount than the demolition work.
The other way the bank intends to fill PNC Center’s 1,037,825 square feet is through leasing select areas. That includes marketing floors 26-33 to potential office tenants in the 744,241-square-foot tower.
The Gateway Center office building on Miller Road in suburban Brecksville is half-leased by PNC whose workers will soon relocate to Downtown Cleveland (LoopNet).
PNC also seeks to fill offices and ground-floor retail spaces in a four-story-tall, 91,450-square-foot annex along Euclid Avenue. The bank is already renovating PNC Plaza at the northwest corner of Euclid and East 9th.
NEOtrans broke the story last month that PNC is starting a $200 million, 10-year renovation of PNC Center. This follows prior news that PNC in May ended remote and hybrid work by requiring employees to return to the office five days a week.
“As part of our ongoing commitment to Downtown Cleveland, we continue to invest in PNC Center and the broader Cleveland market,” Lynn Sexton, PNC’s director of regional communications, told NEOtrans last month.
That means the end of the bank’s longtime office presence at significant locations that go back to the days of National City Bank. The Cleveland-based National City Bank was absorbed by PNC in 2008.
Sources say the 85,000-square-foot PNC Brecksville Lending Services, 6750 Miller Rd., is certain to close. That space, which represents roughly half of a 168,000-square-foot building called Gateway Center and owned by Gateway Associates LLC, is already on the market.
This photo of PNC’s Brecksville Lending Services location was taken on a weekend when workers were not in the office. There are more than 80 cubicles visible here although it’s apparent that not all of them are in regular use (LoopNet).
PNC and its predecessor National City have had an office presence at Gateway Center since April 1992, according to a lease memorandum on file with Cuyahoga County’s Fiscal Officer. That 15-year lease had two five-year renewable extensions.
No additional lease memorandums for that suburban Brecksville property were publicly filed since then. If the five-year extensions were continued by PNC and Gateway, its last would expire in April 2027.
Also worth watching are offices at PNC’s Operations Center on West 150th Street in Cleveland’s West Park neighborhood. PNC sold the 21-acre property and its buildings in 2019 to BFR Cleveland Office LLC, an affiliate of Legacy Investing LLC of Arlington, VA, for $54.2 million.
At the time of the sale, PNC leased the entire 270,000-square-foot north building at 4100 W. 150th from BFR Cleveland Office and 44,825 square feet of the 180,000-square-foot South Annex, 4150 W. 150th.
Around the same time the lease began, PNC relocated dozens of employees to the West 150th operations center and to Downtown Cleveland from offices in the eastern suburbs.
The PNC Operations Center on West 150th Street in Cleveland’s West Park is another facility that could be affected by PNC’s edict of closing leased properties (Google).
BFR Cleveland Office in 2022 sold the South Annex to Stratcap Datasphere 4150 West 150th Street LLC of Greenwich, CT for use by T5 Data Centers. PNC’s leases in the north and south buildings aren’t due to expire until 2036 and have two five-year extensions available as options.
The two buildings on West 150th are actually comprised of multiple structures. National City added on to several pre-existing structures in the 1980s to create its operations center. Among other things, the center processes checks — something which only about half of Americans use today.
The oldest structure dates back to 1948 which was previously owned and operated by Republic Powdered Metals, now Medina-based RPM International. The northern part of the West 150th bank operations center was the site of an American Seaway Foods distribution center.
It remains to be seen how much of the West 150th operations center will be vacated by PNC. In contrast, PNC’s Strongsville Tech Center, 8100 Mohawk Dr., is owned by the bank and apparently not affected by the company’s office relocations.
Sexton did not respond to two e-mails from NEOtrans seeking information about the pending relocations. All real estate brokers involved in the listings of the for-lease properties declined to comment, citing non-disclosure agreements.
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