Sunset Pilot Plaza
Ameriprise Financial, a Minneapolis-based financial services company, plans to open a Western hub that will employ 300 people in a call center by 2013.
The company has purchased Sunset Pilot Plaza, a 100,000-square-foot office complex at 280 Pilot Road in the Hughes Airport Center business park for its Las Vegas office, which will have space for as many as 900 employees. Ameriprise bought the complex from MIG Real Estate, a California-based real estate investment company.
Bridget Sperl, Ameriprise’s vice president of service delivery, said plans are to open the office in April and ramp up to 300 employees by 2013.
Recruitment will start by the end of the year, and few employees will move from Minneapolis, she said. Pay rates haven’t been determined.
The office will serve as a call center to handle financial transactions and other needs of clients and a technology center employing computer programmers, Sperl said.
“We have been looking for an opportunity to have a Western site to take advantage of the time zone, the business continuity and different kind of weather patterns,” Sperl said. “We know other calls centers have done well. We’re impressed with Las Vegas for those reasons as well as the workforce there. We are very impressed with UNLV and the fact that so many people get their degree and stay there.”
Ameriprise, which has 10,000 financial advisers across the country, has done well the last two to three years, and company officials thought this was the best time to add a Western presence, Sperl said.
The headquarters is Minneapolis. The executive team is based in New York, and the mutual fund team is based in Boston, she said.
“This is about growing the organization,” Sperl said.
Ameriprise Financial paid $14.5 million for the three-story office building.
MIG, which is based in Newport Beach, Calif., paid $8.6 million for the property in October 2010. The property was built in 2008 within the 3.3 million-square-foot Hughes Airport Center business park.
Sunset Pilot Plaza was MIG’s first purchase in Las Vegas, and the company has acquired other commercial properties since. This is the first sale it has announced.
MIG CEO Greg Merage said Sunset Pilot Plaza is among only a few Class A office buildings in the valley offering 100,000 square feet of contiguous space.
“This was instrumental in the attraction of a public company with significant space requirements and has allowed us to complete a sale of this property well in advance of our contemplated timeline,” Merage said in a statement.
MIG was represented by Darren Lemmon of CB Richard Ellis in Las Vegas. Ameriprise Financial was represented by Charles Snyder of CBRE in Minneapolis and Randy Broadhead of CBRE in Las Vegas, according to MIG.
Ameriprise requires its call center applicants to have a two-year certificate or four-year college degree, Sperl said. They are even required to pass a test.
“They have to know a lot of information about financial services,” Sperl said. “It’s a good job they can grow in and get promoted. It’s a good opportunity for those who want to be in the financial services business.”