The I-75 corridor in Hillsborough County has been such a draw to corporations and their employers that Brandon in recent years has become a developer's mecca. Developers such as Highwood Properties, Crescent Resources Inc. and Duke-Weeks Realty Corp. are a few of the key players that have invested millions of dollars delivering the corporate campuses for such firms as JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, Progressive Insurance and Uniroyal Optoelectronics.

Last year alone residential developers built more than 5,000 multifamily units in the greater Brandon area to accommodate this growth. And the trend continues this year in spite of the slowing national economy, especially in residential development.

"We're still exploding with new growth," says Eric Eicher at Commercial Brokerage Co., the commercial real estate broker for Crescent Resources at the Parkway Center at the Oak Creek mixed-use project in Riverview. "There are still quite a few apartment projects under way and they're filling up with people."

Eicher can cite off the top of his head another 1,200 units in development, and "that's on top of the 5,000 built last year," he says.

Single-family homes are mushrooming throughout the area as well. "I saw a report last year that shows six of the top 10 permitted areas for development were in the greater Brandon area," says Mike Fencel, Brandon Regional Hospital's CEO and board member at the Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce. "As I drive around it seems that every day a new subdivision or multifamily project is going up. I sometimes wonder where all these people are coming from. With the population growth we're experiencing and the potential for business coming in developers are confident they'll sell or fill what they're putting in place today."

Drawn to the magnetism of this home-building frenzy comes Home Depot Inc., not just to provide building materials for the do-it-yourselfers living in Brandon but bringing as many as 1,000 new jobs for its regional call center that will locate in a 100,000-square-foot building in the area. Other corporations opening new operations in the area include Graybar Electric Co. Inc., Black & Decker Corp. and Diamond Products, Inc.

"These businesses decide to locate into our community because of the quality of life, availability of schools and housing, easy access to and from Tampa and Orlando with the I-75 and I-4 corridors," Fencel says. "The opportunity for an available labor force is also attractive."

Once thought of as a bedroom community to downtown Tampa, Brandon has accumulated a bevy of corporations that are located conveniently to the population mass along the I-75 corridor.

"We get people fairly easily," agrees Alan Ord, Black & Decker's manager of its new $4-million, 112,000-square-foot facility in Parkway Center at Oak Creek in Riverview. "In 1995 we employed 50 people and now we're at 160."

The global manufacturer of power tools, hardware and home improvement products produces reciprocated saw blades, jigsaw blades and hole saws in its new Brandon facility. The firm previously operated in a 48,000-square-foot facility in Tampa. Crescent Resources Inc. developed Black & Decker's new facility at Falkenburg Road near I-75. "We have the option for an additional 40,000 square feet for future expansion," says Ord. "We're investing a lot in automation. At the turn of 2000 we had a $9 million investment in capital equipment. In the next three years we'll invest another $14 million."

Beating the competition
While Ord does acknowledge that the low rate of unemployment in the Tampa Bay area "is a disadvantage," he says that the area's average rate of pay helped to justify the division's capital expenditure in its new facility. "A lot of manufacturers are moving to low-wage economies like Mexico and China," he says.

"We were able to justify keeping the facility here based on the bottom line of dollars. We can compete directly with the Far East. We've squeezed labor costs down, which means we can compete with low-wage economies."

And while Black & Decker is moving into its new facility, Crescent Resources is starting a new build-to-suit at Parkway Center.

"We've broken ground on a 208,000-square-foot building for Graybar," says Joe Taggart, Crescent's vice president. "We've had a lot of activity at Parkway over the last 24 months. We're high on Brandon. It's a great market."

St. Louis-based Graybar Electric Co. Inc. is an international distributor of more than 4,500 electrical, communications and data products with sales exceeding $5 billion last year. The firm distributes, for example, General Electric lighting products, Square D electrical products and Lucent Technologies communications and data products.

Other companies that have already set up operations in Oak Creek include the 220,000-square-foot distribution center for Premier Beverage Co. and a 43,000-square-foot pump manufacturing facility for Canariis Corp.

Citigroup Inc.'s large Citibank complex just west of I-75 handles more than $450 billion in financial transactions every day.

A home for Home Depot
At Legacy Park, another business park along the I-75 corridor south of Brandon, a speculative 100,000-square-foot building appears to have been spoken for by Home Depot. Although no one connected with the deal will disclose details, experts in the commercial real estate community are speculating that is the new location for the home improvement center's new customer service center.

"Home Depot is in final stages of negotiation at Legacy Park," says Doug Bartley at Jones Lang LaSalle, the commercial real estate firm in charge of leasing at the neighboring Interchange Center business park. "If you look at the I-75 corridor and the growth it's experienced to the north, the next growth has got to come south. Companies like Graybar and Black and Decker are coming here. That lends credibility to the south county area."

"We do have a signed letter of intent," says Gary Bauler at CB Richard Ellis, the firm handling leasing at Legacy Park, but he's not acknowledging the tenant.

He says "another 100,000-square-foot building will be built at Legacy Park."

Home Depot's new call center will handle customer calls for the stores in its southern division, including Florida and southern Alabama.

"Today about 75 percent of the calls to our stores are transferred to the sales floor," says Ramon Gregory, the firm's senior vice president of customer service operations. "By taking those calls off the floor, our associates will be able to spend more time with their in-store customers."

The company will staff the new center with sales associates from its 100 stores in the southern division, which is gearing up to add another 100 stores. "Our customer contact center is aimed at reducing tasks in our stores," says Tony Brown, the firm's president of the Southern Division in Tampa. "Associates will be recruited for the center from our Florida stores as well as from outside the company, which is good news for the Tampa Bay economy, as well."

New jobs in the local economy have also brought good news to Brandon from Household International (NYSE:HI), a consumer finance company headquartered in Chicago. Household outgrew its previous facility at Harbour Island, where it employed 700 people, and last year moved into its new 120,000-square-foot office building along the I-75 corridor.

"We handle collections for the branch office portfolio," says John O'Brien, the firm's vice president. "We've added 100 people since the move. It's a great location, readily accessible. Our employees live within easy driving distance to the facility. It's near major highways, restaurants and the mall (Brandon Town Center). And we have a good supply of people who are great employees."

O'Brien relocated from Chicago last year. "My family and I are happy with this area," he says. "My commute has dropped from an hour to 15 minutes with the same mileage and the weather obviously is ideal."

Windy City, goodbye
The company has also relocated another operation from Chicago to the Brandon facility. The wholesale mortgage servicing business has 700 employees. "We moved 150 people from Chicago," says Greg Gibson, Household's chief operating officer. "The attraction of a move to Florida was a driving factor. This is a great place to attract people."

Notwithstanding the transfer of positions within the company, Household "last year hired over 900 people in this facility locally," Gibson says. "We looked at the area and felt the availability of the talent pool here and proximity to several universities was important in terms of drawing talent."

The functions handled by Gibson's division include customer service, cash processing, tax escrow funds management, collections and underwriting.

The company goes to great lengths to retain its staff and has received awards from industry magazines for its excellence in pay and benefits. Working Mother and Computerworld have placed it on their lists of top 100 companies for work.

When it comes to having an edge to recruit employees, "the job market is very competitive," acknowledges Barton Bridges, chairman at Diamond Products Inc., which just occupied its new 140,000-square-foot corporate headquarters adjacent to the I-75 corridor near Sabal Park. The company, with 200 employees locally and a total of 600, manufactures private-label and store brand personal care products, first aid supplies and baby products. "We do contract manufacturing for national brand personal care companies," says Bridges. Products include mouthwash and body lotions. "We also distribute the White Rain brand of shampoos, conditioners and hair sprays along with Tony home permanents, Adorn hairspray and Dippity Do."

The corporate offices have doubled in size with this expansion, which "was necessary to support our current and continuing growth of business," says Bridges. "We had two office locations (Seffner and Sabal Park) and are now consolidated into one. We felt that to be able to centralize our offices would be much more effective for our business operation. Then we decided to combine our office and distribution center."

Annual sales at Diamond Products are $50 million. "Our company is international," Bridges says. "From this facility we cover distribution nationwide. Access to I-75 is important to us from a distribution standpoint. That was the driving force for the selection of our location."

At the neighboring Tampa Park of Commerce, Southern Wine & Spirits has recently purchased 10 acres for an expansion. And Tampa G, a manufacturer of canvas covers for golf carts, has purchased three acres. The company, currently located in Ybor City, plans to build a 50,000-square-foot facility on that property for future expansion.

"This follows on the heels of the expansions by Key West Lamps and Inframetals, a multinational company," says Ed Miller, a commercial real estate broker at Colliers Arnold."This is indicative of an industrial stealth market. Overall there is an economic slowdown but we refuse to participate. There is a certain degree of momentum.

"In the past two quarters there has been a slowdown, but it's gone from robust growth of 5 percent plus to less than 2 percent," Miller says. "There have been many highly publicized layoffs but employment remains high and interest rates have fallen. Companies are positioning to take advantage of a buyer-friendly environment."

Cause for pause
Meanwhile speculative development of commercial real estate has slowed considerably along the I-75 corridor. "The technology portion of the market has vaporized," says Chuck Sullivan at ProLogis Trust. "Our portfolio in Sabal Park is 100-percent occupied but we're tabling a proposed new building. There are other comparable options in the market, which gives us cause for pause. Some people are building and for the first time in five years are delivering buildings completely vacant. But we haven't seen concessions enter the market place. Tenants are sitting tight right now."

Sullivan adds, "light industrial and distribution not associated with technology is holding its own. We had a huge bubble pushing through over the past few years and to take it away so quickly and dramatically, we're bound to feel the aftershock."

Not as impacted by such aftershock, Duke-Weeks Realty Corp. is putting the finishing touches on 250,000 square feet of industrial space in Fairfield Distribution Center. "We have two tenants totaling 72,000 square feet," says Moses Salcido, the firm's vice president. "Central Power Systems distributes Briggs & Stratton motors and Southeastern Food Supply is a food distributor."

While the slowdown in the economy has certainly impacted many technology firms, several high-tech companies have recently relocated or expanded in Brandon. Boca Raton-based TelePlace paid $12 million and is investing another $38 million in the former Citicorp building in Brandon to create a data center so that high-tech firms can hook directly to a fiberoptic network. The company will provide Web-hosting services.

Sarasota-based Uniroyal Opto- electronics (Nasdaq:UTCI) continues to pump capital investments into its high-brightness light-emitting diode (LED) facility in Brandon. "We're targeted to spend an additional $30 million, adding multiple reactors every three to four months," says Bob Soran, the firm's president. "We started with three reactors originally and have infrastructure in place to handle 16 to 20 reactors."

Pumping dollars into research
Along with increasing capacity for production of LEDs, the firm has added an impressive team of researchers in Brandon. "Jeff Nelson and two other people have joined us from Sandia (National Laboratories in New Mexico)," Soran says. "We hired Dr. Christian Wetzel, a German scientist who came from Meijo University in Japan and has worked with Dr. Agosaki, the acknowledged founder of the process for producing blue and green high-brightness LEDs. We've also hired other people out of the University of California in Santa Barbara. One of our competitors in the market place has made a statement that this is the best research and development team in the world today for high-brightness LEDs.

"This is a tribute to the Tampa Bay area," adds Soran. "What brought these researchers here is our commitment to this facility but also somewhere in there are the quality-of-life issues in the Tampa Bay area. Florida was a significant plus in the equation."

The Uniroyal facility is one of four in the world that produce high-brightness LEDS in blues and greens. "The industry continues to grow in excess of 50 percent in dollars per year," Soran says. "Traffic lights are using the technology now but it will be a while before it's in people's homes."

The research team now in place in Brandon is "working on brightness improvement," says Soran. "Since last year we've introduced three generations of product and now have some of the brightest LEDs in the worldwide market place. Last year they were at 1 milliwatt in blues and we're now reaching up to 4 milliwatts in brightness. When you consider that the competitors in our industry have been in business 10 or 15 years and we've been here 18 months, that's an enormous accomplishment and we're putting that product in the market place."

Finding a place to store the products of its customers, Iron Mountain Records Management (NYSE:IRM) - a provider of storage for paper, computer disks and tapes, microfilm and microfiche, master audio and video tapes, film and optical disks, X-rays and blueprints - has expanded by 58,870 square feet. The Boston-based firm also provides such services as filing, retrieval and destruction of records, database management and disaster recovery support.

In First Park at Brandon MF Lightwave is a fiberoptics firm that has occupied 12,150 square feet in one of two new buildings totaling 134,260 square feet, developed by First Industrial Realty Trust. "Brandon is a very active community," says Bob Krueger, First Industrial's regional development officer. "There's a lot going on."

Household Inc. has 1,186 employees handling back office operations for the Chicago-based consumer finance firm at its new facility in Brandon.

MF Lightwave, with clients such as Verizon, Lucent Technologies and Time Warner, has relocated from a 3,000-square-foot building in Ybor City. "Last year we were three people and today we're almost 40," says Tony Medeiros, the firm's president. "We're projected to be at 85 by the end of the year. We needed space and First Park at Brandon constructed this building in a timely fashion. We were under a tight deadline to move. We'd outgrown our facility and couldn't expand our products and services any more."

The year-old company has not been tremendously impacted by the slowing economy. "The downturn had a slight impact for one quarter but we're back on the upswing," Medeiros says. "We're a specialized niche market. We provide assemblies no one else provides." In addition to its fiberoptic cable assemblies, the firm manufactures "high-end video inspection cameras," says Medeiros. "The miniaturized camera is able to magnify images up to 400 times. We use it to troubleshoot fiberoptic equipment."

Equipping the bomb squad
Medeiros has found another application for this technology. "We've been called by the Tampa police department and the bomb squad to produce special equipment for dangerous situations," he says. "We're developing a wireless video system that officers in a remote location can see what the officers on site are doing. It transmits live images in real time, full motion and provides an extra set of eyes to protect them. The officers wear a camera no larger than a pen."

The system is gaining recognition elsewhere. "Now the Tampa fire department wants it for rescue operations," says Medeiros. "If someone is trapped under debris in a collapsed building, they can snake the camera in and get images. We have the potential to deploy this nationwide."

At Palm River North EastGroup Property recently completed a 96,000-square-foot building. "We're seeing local expansions," says Nancy Phaneuf, the firm's vice president of marketing. "When we get this building 50-percent leased we're going to build at Palm River South. It will be a different type of building that will have a shallower bay depth at 140 feet and two and a half times the parking. Tenants like that. We're building to the lowest common denominator and there are a lot of requests for that."

MasTec Inc. (NYSE:MTZ) has occupied 16,000 square feet at Palm River North. The Miami-based telecommunications company has located its wireless operation and technology division in this, one of 240 offices the company has nationwide. Clients in its wireless division include Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. In addition, MasTec has consolidated its Direct TV installation crew into its new South Brandon location. "Our technology division provides services to companies that own vertical real estate," says Cliff Padgett, the firm's vice president of operations.

"Our group provides real estate site acquisition services for some of those clients that lease space for cell sites. And several trucks are dispatched out of that office for Direct TV installations."

Choosing Palm River North for this office boiled down to several key factors. "We enjoy the area for accessibility to Tampa, Lakeland and Orlando," says Bill Able, the firm's real estate manager. "We like the access to I-4 and I-75. Our employees live nearby and we didn't want to disrupt the drive times."

The developer also played largely into MasTec's choice of locations. "EastGroup Properties has a history and track record of building quality properties on time," Able says. "They got us in 15 days earlier than anticipated."

Another technology player has added a 12-employee office in Brandon. Gaithersburg, Md.-based Netcom Technologies Inc. provides infrastructure services, cable plant services, engineering and corporate certification. The firm has sales of $15 million.

At Interchange Center, the newest business park to offer companies options in the South Brandon area, developers Triad Investors Inc. and Alex. Brown Realty Inc. are planning five buildings totaling 850,000 square feet. "The infrastructure is in and we'll start on the first 133,000-square-foot building in the next 30 days," says Doug Bartley at Jones Lang LaSalle, the real estate firm that handles leasing. "The parking ratios are higher than average, providing the maximum amount of flexibility for an office use."

Developer Robert E. Woolley Corp. is creating a section at Oak Creek business park that will contain industrial condominiums, with units ranging from 5,500 square feet to at least 90,000 square feet. In the northeast section, the developer has moved forward with residential units. "More than 40 homes sold prior to opening our first model," says Eric Eicher at Commercial Brokerage Co. "People are showing up at the site wanting to buy houses. It's such an easy commute from Oak Creek to downtown (Tampa). We're 12 minutes from downtown. But this is also due to a combination of job growth in the corridor between Chase, Citibank, Household Finance and Ford Motor Credit. And there are numerous other companies coming to the corridor."

New York City-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. has started operating JPMorgan Treasury Technologies Corp. in three buildings totaling 450,000 square feet at its Highland Oaks campus. Developer Duke-Weeks Realty Corp. delivered the buildings in less than a year.

"We had our first employee January 22nd and recently broke the 500 barrier," says Irv Cohen, president at JPMorgan Treasury Technologies and the senior executive for the Highland operation. "The buildings are fully operational as well as our state-of-the-art childcare facility, health club and cafeteria."

Lightning-Fast Dollars
JPMorgan Treasury Services is a global provider of treasury and cash management operations for corporations, financial institutions and governments. "We're number one in high-speed automatic processing of transfers in the world," Cohen says. "We process over 225,000 transactions averaging $1.4 trillion daily. These transactions will be located at this facility. You can imagine how important this (operation) is."

Many of the jobs that JPMorgan has brought to the area are technology related. "We've been doing quite well staffing the high-tech positions," says Cohen. "We're getting a good response from the local community and have met with the president of the University of South Florida and the deans of the schools of business and IT (information technology). We've told them we're here, we're open and want to be a good partner in the community. We'll work together on research projects and job placement. We've seen applicants through that source."

Meanwhile JPMorgan has made attractive offers to its New York staff to transfer to this area. "We're getting a nice response at the management level," Cohen says. "Currently 30 percent are relocating from New York. The ambiance of the Tampa Bay area combined with this beautiful facility has led to increased participation of people moving from New York. In total we should have 1,400 employees at this facility next summer (2002)."

With the tremendous population growth that follows on the heels of the jobs that companies such as JPMorgan Chase have brought to Brandon, its local hospital has felt the pressure to accommodate the citizens' increasing needs for health care. Brandon Regional Hospital is doubling the size of its facility. "The growth in the community as a whole is reflected in the business generated at the hospital," says Mike Fencel, the hospital's chief executive officer. "Our admission rates, emergency department visits, obstetrical deliveries and surgical procedures are exceeding the overall population growth rate of 1.5 to 2 percent. HCA Health Care Corp. has approved a $50-million construction project to expand services we offer."

As part of this expansion, the hospital is developing a new cardiac unit. "For the first time ever we'll provide cardiac surgery services for eastern Hillsborough County residents," Fencel says. "Today they have to go to Tampa or Lakeland. Along with this will come other cardiac interventions now that we'll have the back up of cardiac surgery."

This expansion follows on the heels of a "$7-million emergency department expansion," adds Fencel. "We had annual visits (to the emergency department) of 43,000 prior to that expansion. This year we're projecting 68,000."

While the hospital responds to the demands of an increasing population, Brandon Town Center continues to enjoy high rates of traffic. "We're at 96 percent occupancy and our traffic numbers are up," says Carrie Crawford, marketing manager at Urban Retail Property.

The 980,000-square-foot regional mall was acquired by Dutch-based Rodamco North America N.V. as part of its $3.4-billion purchase of Urban Shopping Centers Inc.

"Brandon Town Center attracts more than 10-million people a year," Eicher says.

Meanwhile more retail has come to Brandon. "Costco and JoAnn's Fabrics have just opened at the Lakes of Brandon," says Eicher. "Brandon is still positioned to be one of the fastest-growing areas of Hillsborough County and the I-75 corridor."