Highwoods to build Asurion’s $285m HQ campus in Nashville, provide 400 new tech jobs

Highwoods Properties has plans to build a new $285 million headquarters campus in Nashville’s central business district for Asurion, a privately held tech solutions firm.

The campus will encompass approximately 551,000 square feet, including approximately 9,000 square feet of street-level retail. The project, which will seek LEED designation, will be developed on a 4.2-acre parcel located at Church Street and 11th Avenue North that was acquired by Highwoods early this year.

The project is 98.3 percent pre-leased overall with the office portion to be fully occupied by Asurion under a long-term lease. The project will consist of two structures, one of nine stories and the other eight stories, built atop a six-level, 3.5/1,000 parking podium, including portions below and above grade. The two mid-rise buildings will provide Asurion with a horizontal campus in an urban environment with a multi-faceted lobby connecting both structures along with sky bridges at the 5th and 7th floors.

The development will enable Asurion to consolidate four existing facilities from the greater Nashville area into a single location, with access from both Church Street and 11th Avenue North. Located on the Gulch Greenway, the development will serve as a connector for the Gulch and Capitol View areas. In addition, the new campus will create 400 new information technology jobs, according to local media reports.

Construction is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2019 with a fourth quarter 2021 targeted completion date.

Nashville has experienced employment gains since the downturn. In the past decade, the Middle Tennessee metro has experienced 25 percent job growth, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Nashville MSA’s unemployment rate was 2.3 percent in May 2018.

Nashville was ranked number 45 among top tech talent markets in the United States and Canada, according to CBRE’s 2018 Scoring Tech Talent report.

And research from Livability.com shows Nashville comes in second primarily because it has the perfect combination of thousands of technology job opportunities and a low cost of living.

Asurion was honored with a 2018 Top Workplaces award by The Tennessean.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Asurion made the Top Workplace list, which is awarded to employers in the Nashville area. In addition to the Top Workplaces award, Asurion received certification as a 2017–2018 Great Place to Work®, was recently ranked #14 among large organizations on Computerworld's 2018 100 Best Places to Work in IT, and it was named to the 2018 CIO 100 list. Asurion was also honored as the 2018 Tech Company of the Year and 2018 Diversity Game Changer of the Year by the Nashville Tech Council.