LTD to bunk at Wachovia Center

Mayor Paul Fraim will announce today that LTD Management, a Chesapeake hotel development firm, will relocate downtown.

"To have a company that was born and grown in an outlying city and wants to move into the urban center is really good news," Fraim said Thursday, confirming the announcement, which he'll make during his State of the City address.

LTD will bring nearly 80 employees making an average of $65,000 to the Wachovia Center, a $150 million project that is scheduled to open in 2010.

To be built on 4.5 acres between MacArthur Center and Scope on Monticello Avenue, the project will have a 22-story office tower with 250,000 square feet of space, 175 apartments, 50,000 square feet of retail space, and 2,000 parking spaces.

Alan Nusbaum, chairman of S.L. Nusbaum Realty, which is developing the property, said LTD will lease 25,000 square feet and bring the occupancy rate of the building to 68 percent.

"There's never been an office building in Norfolk that's been 68 percent leased before starting construction, at least not in my lifetime," Nusbaum said.

"We're dealing with other prospects and hope to have other announcements soon. But to be at this point this soon is very comforting."

Nusbaum said Wachovia Bank, the anchor tenant, will finance the project.

LTD managing partners Harry K. Thakkar and Dilip R. Desai had planned to relocate from Chesapeake to a new office park in suburban Norfolk but said Nusbaum called them a week ago and asked them to move downtown.

"It was the fastest decision our board has ever made," Thakkar said. "Moving downtown just made a lot of sense."

Thakkar said the fact that Nusbaum is a family-owned businesses was an attraction.

"We are a family-owned business, too," he said. "We have the same philosophy. That made us comfortable moving into their building."

The Thakkar and Desai families run LTD, which has developed 22 hotels and is building 10 more. Thakkar's and Desai's sons lobbied their fathers to move downtown.

"They love the energy of downtown," Desai said. "Our sons are pretty much running the company from day to day. We had to honor their desire."

Desai said Norfolk also was a desirable address.

"When we travel around the country, it was difficult to explain where Chesapeake was," he said. "When we said it's next to Norfolk, they got it. We knew as senior partners, as the company grew, we needed to move to Norfolk."

LTD, which operates the downtown Courtyard by Marriott, also is constructing a Residence Inn by Marriott downtown. LTD also took over the development of a downtown hotel to be connected to a city-constructed convention center.

Construction on the convention hotel, which is likely to be a Westin, will begin later this year. Thakkar and Desai said the project has grown in scope and will rise between 24 and 26 stories, compared to the planned 16, which will make it one of the taller buildings in the area.

Thakkar and Desai said it will be topped off with eight or 10 condominiums.

"All of them will be presold," Thakkar said, who added that it's likely family members will purchase most of them.

Desai said as they worked on that project, he began to see the pluses of relocating LTD in Wachovia Center downtown.

"We need to attract high-powered people to our company," he said. "By having our office in this kind of building, in this kind of atmosphere, it will help us recruit those people. It is an expense for us, but we feel the benefits will outweigh the costs."

The past year was a difficult one for the city in some respects, in that several downtown projects stalled.

Fraim is expected to tout many of the successes expected this year, including the construction of four new downtown hotels and four new apartment complexes that will bring more than 1,000 new residents to Norfolk.

His speech is scheduled for noon at the downtown Norfolk Marriott Waterside.