DRA - Tennessee

By Trisha Ostrowski


LEDIC Realty Company

After looking around, LEDIC’s headquarters land in Memphis

 

State, City of Memphis and LEDIC officials announced in November 2015 the company would locate its new national headquarters in Memphis. In 2015, LEDIC Realty Inc., acquired more than 9,000 apartment units across the country. Among the fastest growing real estate firms in the nation now, LEDIC needed a new headquarters to keep pace with its expanding operation of 40,000 properties and more than 1,100 employees.

 

In the end, it just made sense to locate its headquarters in Memphis. After all, the company was founded there in 1979, and even after merging with a Montgomery-based firm in 2015, it seemed clear that Memphis was home.

 

So, in November 2015, LEDIC announced plans to retrofit and improve a four-story, 60,000-square-foot building in Memphis to become its national headquarters and training facility. The facility is not only being used for education and offices, but also for hosting large real estate association groups.

 

Local investment with national reach

LEDIC President and CEO Pierce Ledbetter personally drove supplies donated by LEDIC employees and residents in Memphis to residents at the company’s Meadowbrook Apartments located in Baton Rouge, La. Regional Manager Chris Jones met Pierce to collect and help distribute the supplies to victims of recent flooding.“LEDIC has been a mainstay in our community for decades. The expansion will generate hundreds of jobs that will strengthen the Memphis and Shelby County area,” said Mark H. Luttrell Jr., mayor of Shelby County. “It’s proof our quest for new business development is yielding results.”

 

LEDIC, a fully-integrated manager, owner and developer of multifamily properties, is investing $10.2 million in Memphis. In total, the company will be creating 300 jobs (100 at the headquarters in a variety of real estate back office functions) accounting, data engineering and training.

 

LEDIC also has offices in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, and considered other locations for its new headquarters. But, in the end, company leaders kept returning to Memphis as the optimal choice.

 

The fact that more than half the apartments currently under construction in Shelby County are managed by LEDIC demonstrates the company’s strong local position. “LEDIC is honored to grow alongside our city’s roster of leading multifamily firms headquartered in Memphis,” said LEDIC CEO Pierce Ledbetter.

 

Memphis is currently home to six Fortune 1000 companies, at least in part because the area combines some of the lowest corporate real estate rates in the country with low cost of living and consistently low taxes. In other words, it’s an extremely affordable place to live and do business. There is also a growing network of shared services locally, which supports corporate financial, human resources, IT and call center functions.

 

“LEDIC’s decision to locate a new national headquarters in Memphis marks the second headquarters commitment in less than two weeks right here in Shelby County,” said Tennessee Community Development Commissioner Randy Boyd at the time of LEDIC’s announcement. “Tennessee is a state that values and nurtures our businesses, and we strive to promote their success. I appreciate the new jobs LEDIC is creating for our communities and look forward to our continued partnership.”

 

The additional 200 jobs that LEDIC’s expansion is creating will be dispersed throughout Tennessee — primarily in construction, maintenance, leasing and management.

 

The announcement came on the heels of the news earlier in November 2015 that Evergreen Packaging had formalized plans to locate its global headquarters in Memphis. Just one month earlier, hardware and home improvement products distributor, Orgill Inc., announced plans to build a new world headquarters in nearby Collierville, in the suburban Memphis area.

 

These companies join many others that have chosen Memphis for a corporate headquarters. Along with household-name companies like International Paper, ServiceMaster, FedEx, and AutoZone, Memphis now is home to about 240 other headquarters.

 

Growth driven by technology

LEDIC — a manager, owner and developer of multifamily properties across the United States — has invested $10.2 million and created 300 jobs. The company chose a 60,000-square-foot existing building that it was able to retrofit as a state-of-the-art headquarters and training facility.For LEDIC, technology played a central role in the decision to stay in Memphis. “We looked at the fiber optic network around Memphis,” said Ledbetter. He and his team found that this location offered internet speed faster than Google fiber -- up to 10 gigabits per second. That cinched the deal to remain in this area. Memphis also offered reliability for the company’s peace of mind. The Memphis area has a self-healing fiber optics network with a total of 11 different providers.

 

The fast, reliable internet will be crucial for LEDIC, as they continue to monitor, manage and grow a portfolio of properties that now covers most of the southern half of the country. It also allows the company to create a state-of-the-art training facility onsite with classrooms and technology for a wide range of professional educational purposes. They’re calling it “LEDIC University.” In addition, Ledbetter said that internet infrastructure would be made available to other building tenants and nearby offices to create a technology center.

 

As the company continues to grow, the wisdom of the decision to stay in Memphis is clear. Not only is the city near the geographical center of the U.S., it is easily accessible to the many population centers in the eastern part of the country. And it is a prime location to manage properties that literally stretch from Florida to Arizona. In other words, for this real estate company, there really is no place like home.

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