St. Pete's vibrant urban core helped it land Twinlab deal in national HQ search
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Apr 14, 2015

St. Petersburg was far from a shoo-in for the Twinlab Consolidation Corp. headquarters.

The maker of Metabolife diet and energy products, Fuel sports supplement products, Alvita herbal teas and Trigosamine joint support products is planning to lease two floors - more than 30,000 square feet - in St. Petersburg's First Central Tower, as the Tampa Bay Business Journal was first to report Tuesday.

TCC (OTC: TLCC) will bring 80 employees - many expected to relocate from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Utah and Manhattan - to downtown St. Pete, which edged out competitor cities with its vibrant urban core, said the broker who represented TCC.

Sanford Mahr, president of TMC-The Mahr Co. in Tampa, said TCC's search for a new corporate headquarters spanned multiple states and counties throughout Florida.

And it's impossible to single out one factor that led to St. Pete winning the deal, the walkable downtown and urban waterfront were definitely big factors, Mahr said.

Downtown St. Pete, he said, appealed to the "various tastes and needs of the employees from the C-level suite down to support."

"It's the lifestyle," Mahr said. "It's a convergence of things that are happening with respect to not only office, but retail and entertainment, and it's kind of like a village, a community village. It's a real, existing urban environment."

The landlord that won the deal is a joint venture of Feldman Equities, Tower Realty Partners and Second City Real Estate, which acquired First Central Tower in late 2014. That building - and the others owned by the same partners in downtown St. Pete - were "afterthoughts," Mahr said, until the decision makers toured them and met with Feldman Equities CEO Larry Feldman.

"[Feldman] does a presentation and delivers a product that's very difficult for others to compete with," Mahr said. Feldman and his partners are planning $10 million in renovations to the tower to modernize the space and make it more appealing to a millennial workforce.

Ashley Gurbal Kritzer is a reporter for the Tampa Bay Business Journal.