On Real Estate

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Frost Bank sheds space

Leopard Street branch adds café, new rooms, uses fewer square feet

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

Yulanda Dawson (from left) gets some help from Joann Lanehart, a personal banker at Frost Bank, while Earnest Hatten watches at the cyber café at 2402 Leopard St. The café is a new feature at the Frost Bank branch.

When Frost Bank wanted to do a lot more at its 2402 Leopard St. location, it made an unusual real estate move - it opted for less space.
   The bank, which once occupied about 8,000 square feet in the former Citizens Bank headquarters, now is working with 5,500 square feet. While that may seem a like a big square-footage drop, the bank actually is doing more with less, officials said.
   Frost Bank inherited the Leopard Street location in its 1997 merger with Citizens Bank. Frost Bank now has nine financial centers in the Corpus Christi area, and it's adding locations.
   But while big is sometimes better in terms of number of branches and assets, Frost Bank is following a different strategy when it comes to actual branch size. The bank is on a mission to make its locations cozier. It's all part of an industry trend to make banking less impersonal and more accessible to customers, officials said.
   "Banking has changed so much, you don't need the big spaces," said Mike Carrell, Corpus Christi region president.
   In March, the bank debuted its new look, featuring a greeter station, along with an Internet café where customers can access their accounts and investments online. A big-screen television tuned into financial news also is in the Internet café. Carrell said the new look conveys that the facility is more a financial center than a bank, offering personal and business banking, insurance, financial management and brokerage.
   Tall order
   But converting an old bank headquarters into a modern bank branch was a challenge, said Corpus Christi architect Mark Whitmore.
   With its original construction and building additions, the structure had a 1950s and 1960s look to it, Whitmore said. His challenge was to make use of what existed, but make it complement the new Frost Bank design concept.
   "Making the functional aspect work in an existing building shell was a challenge," Whitmore said. "It's one thing to have a blank sheet of paper and three acres of land, but it's a different deal to have 5,000 square feet of existing building shell and make all of these things work within it."
   Citizens Bank had used the Leopard Street location as its headquarters since 1949. Originally, the bank was a one-story, 4,810 square-foot facility. As the bank grew, its owners made additions to the building, even adding a four-floor tower, leaving a hodge-podge appearance.
   After the merger, Frost Bank used about 8,000 square feet of the available 10,000 square feet on the first floor of the building for a branch location. But it soon became apparent that the facility was too large for what Frost Bank needed at that spot.
   "We didn't need all of the space," said Carrell, .
   Frost Bank already had its headquarters on Carancahua Street.
   New look and concepts
   Whitmore visited other Frost Bank branches around the state that had begun incorporating the new look.
   The facility was gutted to make way for the new look. A major element of the new design was the Internet café, Whitmore said. One of its purposes is to serve as a location for a coffee bar, near two computers set up for customers to have access to their accounts online. Another element of the design was the "closing room" where clients closed deals in an informal setting. Part of the closing room concept was to allow customers to bring one of the bank laptops to the closing room and have computer access to the same information as bank employees.
   Open spaces were another concept. Commercial lenders aren't locked up in cubicles, as they typically are in banks. While partitions divide them, they are accessible to clients.
   "Acoustically, they're pretty private, but not as formal as where traditional banking transactions have been done," Whitmore said.
   There were other challenges, Whitmore said. The area Frost Bank is using is the former trust department of the bank.
   "It was really a challenge to get these new areas and lobby areas and departments in existing building," he said. "We evaluated what spaces were best suited for new uses."
   One vault area was transformed into two closing rooms. The room had been built with steel on all sides, limiting the ceiling heights. The vault door was so heavy it couldn't be moved without damaging the floor, he said. Designers polished it up and kept it there for an aesthetic touch.
   While other Frost Bank branches already had incorporated Frost Bank's new concept, the Leopard Street location got the chance to makeover after it struck a lease deal with the city last year.
   The city will use part of the building for fire department administrators, emergency medical administrators, fire training personnel and the Local Emergency Planning Committee. Also moving is the emergency management operations center, currently in the basement of City Hall.
   Council members last year approved a 21-year lease agreement with Frost Bank for its use of a building to house personnel when county and city emergency dispatch services are consolidated into one system.
  
  

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Contact Laura Elder at 886-3678 or elderl@caller.com

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