April 03, 2017

HealthStream inks lease for new downtown HQ

On the heels of growing by 70 percent in three years, HealthStream leaders have signed an agreement to move their headquarters to the Capitol View development on the northwestern edge of downtown Nashville.

HealthStream will lease 65,000 square feet and take up the top two floors of a 10-story building that will rise at the northeast corner of 11th Avenue North and Nelson Merry Street, in Block E of Boyle Nashville’s $750 million Capitol View project in the North Gulch. The company now leases about 73,000 square feet in Cummins Station in SoBro, where it most recently renewed its contract in 2010.

About 340 people will make the move a few blocks to the northwest. HealthStream has signed a lease for 10 and a half years at its new home and has the option to extend its stay there by up to 10 years. Boyle is picking up the first six months of rent for HealthStream, which will pay a base rate of about $1 million in the first year of the lease — that number will climb 2 percent per year after that — as well as certain operating expenses, improvements and parking fees.

“As one of the newest developing urban districts in Nashville, the North Gulch area represents an ideal location for HealthStream’s corporate office,” said HealthStream CEO Bobby Frist. “Our selection of Capitol View, in particular, provides a modern, amenity-rich environment that will be highly attractive to our diverse base of employees, supporting a sense of innovation in our corporate culture.”

HealthStream’s new roughly 300,000-square-foot home will feature about 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and be adjacent to a 2.5-acre park that will connect to Nashville’s greenway system. With much of the grading and site preparation work already complete, Boyle officials are targeting a June 1 groundbreaking and an April 2019 opening for the office building and a parking garage with about 1,200 spots.

Hoar Construction will be the project’s general contractor. Other team members include Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, Cooper Carry, Kiser Vogrin Design, RPM Transportation, TTL, TVG Environmental, Stansell Electric and Jones Brothers.

HealthStream’s decision to move comes after a year in which it grew revenues to $226 million, up 8 percent from 2015 and 71 percent from the end of 2013. Frist and his team have completed eight acquisitions in four and a half years and now employ more than 1,100 people full- and part-time, up from fewer than 700 at the end of 2013.

Officials a month ago said they plan to move some patient interview work here and hire another 45 people at its Highland Ridge office focused on those services. That part of the company’s footprint now houses about 170 people while an office in Brentwood — first leased by Sy.Med, which HealthStream bought in 2012 — is home to about 70 workers.

HealthStream’s commitment is the latest landmark for Boyle’s ambitious Capitol View project, on which it is teaming with Northwestern Mutual. HCA subsidiaries Parallon Business Solutions and the Sarah Cannon Research Institute already have moved into a 16-story office tower with about 430,000 square feet of space that fronts Charlotte Avenue. LifeWay executives broke ground last year on their 10-story future headquarters two blocks north of that building, which is expected to be completed early next year. Combined, those two buildings will be home to more than 2,000 people.

In addition, work began in early December on the block across 11th Avenue from HCA’s tower, where a building will be home to 378 apartments, 40,000 square feet of offices and 60,000 square feet of retail space. That segment of the master plan is projected to open late next year; no tenants have been announced.

Also being built now is Solis North Gulch, a 271-unit apartment project owned by Terwilliger Pappas of Charlotte. That $64 million project broke ground last year and sits just east of LifeWay’s tower. When fully built out, the 32-acre Capitol View project will encompass 1.1 million square feet of office space, 130,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, 600 apartments and two hotels with about 400 rooms in total.

HealthStream spent 20 years in Cummins Station, where owner DZL Management has in recent years invested in amenities and other improvements. Bo Tyler, a managing director at JLL who leases space in the roughly 400,000-square-foot building, wished HealthStream the best and said that, “after the strongest period for leasing in its history,” Cummins Station now is 99 percent full.

“So for the first time in a while, we’ll be able to pursue larger tenants and more freely grow existing tenants,” Tyler said in a statement. “With the Pedestrian Bridge coming, Google Fiber now installed, and the number of inquiries we receive for Cummins Station, this is a win-win for both parties.”

 

Originally published in the Nashville Post

By Geert De Lombaerde