Photo | Grant Welker
1 Mercantile Street in Worcester
Updated: April 21, 2021
Worcester's Unum building to undergo new marketing, leasing
Photo | Grant Welker
1 Mercantile Street in Worcester
By Grant Welker
The seven-story downtown Worcester office building long known for its anchor tenant, the insurer Unum, will undergo new branding and leasing now that Unum has elected to have its area employees indefinitely work remotely.
Franklin Realty Advisors, which owns and operates the Mercantile Center office and retail complex across Mercantile Street, said Wednesday it has been hired to manage, develop and oversee leasing for the building, which according to city records spans 179,000 square feet. The building will be rebranded One Mercantile after its street address.
Unum, whose name adorns the top of the building, said last July it would keep employees working remotely indefinitely, after first having switched to people working from home once the coronavirus pandemic hit. The Tennessee-based company had roughly 400 local employees at the time, and according to Franklin Realty Advisors, the insurer occupied 125,000 square feet of space.
Unum was given a 15-year tax break by the city to move into a new office building, relocating from only a few blocks away The deal allowed the company to pay targeted tax payments instead of the commercial property rate, in exchange for retaining 600 jobs and investing $25 million in the city. The tax deal was decertified by the state government for failure to meet the job-creation goals, although the city kept the deal in place.
Unum's old offices at 18 Chestnut St., which date to its predecessor's days as the Paul Revere Life Insurance Co., remain vacant.
[Related: Worcester revisiting Unum tax break in light of work-from-home change]
Wellesley-based Franklin Realty Advisors will work alongside the Worcester realty firm Kelleher & Sadowsky, the Boston event planning firm Conventures, and the Boston architecture and design company SGA on the rebranding and new marketing. One Mercantile is owned by Benderson Development of Florida, which bought the site for nearly $76 million from an investment arm of Worcester-based Hanover Insurance Group in 2012, when the building was constructed.
The firms will work to draw new tenants at a time that the office market, including in downtown Worcester, has been nearly crippled by a lack of demand during the pandemic. Space available for sublease in the city nearly doubled in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to a year prior, according to Colliers International, a real estate industry analyst. Such sublease space for offices and labs totaled 100,000, or a little over 3% of the city's total inventory. A year prior, that number was roughly 53,000.
Franklin Realty Advisors owns, in addition to the Mercantile Center, One and Two Chestnut Place and the Worcester Business Center, as well as the Southbridge Innovation Center in Southbridge.
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