Post Office Plaza lands tech, property services companies - Crain's Cleveland Business

Two more companies are planning to make their new addresses at Post Office Plaza, the building at 1500 West Third St. in downtown Cleveland owned by K&D Group of Willoughby.

OnShift, a Cleveland software company serving the senior care market, has 220 employees that it plans to move in late summer to the second floor of the building, but it will likely have even more people on staff by then.

"We're growing like crazy," Mike Rich, OnShift chief financial officer, said in a phone interview. "We have 20 open positions as we speak."

Although the company pared 31 jobs early last year in what Rich characterized as a realignment of its operations, it's in hiring mode once more. Growth is coming from both new products and the expansion of assisted living and other senior care providers that OnShift serves with software used for recruiting and scheduling staffs.

OnShift was launched in the late 2000s on the top floor of the Keith Building at 1621 Euclid Ave. It moved within the structure as it grew and now occupies four floors there.

"We decided we needed to do something else" in terms of its office space, Rich said. "We realized that in about a year we would need to take a fifth floor."

The company considered suburban sites but decided it wanted to stay downtown because its generally young workforce enjoys being in the center of the city.

"We really had few options. Post Office Plaza offered us the chance to be on a single floor, while the others would have likely required two floors," Rich said.

Moreover, K&D gave the firm the ability to have right of first refusal on the remaining 25,000 square feet on the floor it won't occupy.

Doug Price, K&D CEO, said in a phone interview that his company and its broker, CBRE, worked hard to retain the company in its portfolio, as the 21-story Keith is also part of its holdings.

"In this market, you don't want to lose a tenant, especially one that's growing," Price said, even though it means K&D will have to find a replacement tenant or multiple companies to backfill the space OnShift will vacate. CBRE already has an email marketing campaign in operation for the Keith space.

The other company that has just leased space at Post Office Plaza for a substantial expansion is Exacta Land Surveyors, a Cleveland-based provider of land surveys nationwide.

Exacta will take almost 20,000 square feet on Post Office Plaza's first floor, moving about 60 employees from its current headquarters in the Knights of Columbus Building, 1219 E. Ninth St.

The company's operations here handle survey reports from surveying crews in six states used in real estate transactions and for mortgages across the nation.

Exacta was acquired by private equity firm Summit Capital of Charlotte, N.C., in February 2019.

Price said the recent lease signings will take the nearly 440,000-square-foot property to more than 80% leased, more than double the rate when K&D bought it from the former Forest City Realty Trust Inc. of Cleveland in 2017.

Conor Coakley, a CBRE first vice president who markets Post Office Plaza and Keith for K&D, said just 40,000 square feet in the building is clearly available as other prospects may take more space.

K&D has made substantial investments in Post Office Plaza, from adding prominent exterior signage to an upgraded fitness center and outfitting a conference room available to tenants with a large conference table left in Terminal Tower, where K&D has added apartments, when the old tenant moved to new offices at Key Tower.

"The building has taken on a new character as more tech-focused companies have moved in," Coakley noted.

OnShift's Rich said among the things that attracted the firm were the additional technology-oriented spaces in the building and that the adjoining Avenue Shops and other parts of the former Tower City Center complex may house the proposed Blockland center to foster innovation in the region.

"Even so," Rich added, "Playhouse Square is a wonderful place to be, and we'll miss it."