Seller, Stearns Bank, N.A., will lease the property at 201 Center Road from BPE Holdings Venice II, LLC. The law firm and title company that acquired the building will operate its business on the second floor, while the bank will occupy the ground floor under a 10-year lease with options. The buyer is performing about $1 million in renovations. Lindberg, who represented Stearns Bank in the deal, has managed several other bank property
transactions during the past two years. These include a Stearns facility at 7555 MLK Jr. St. North in St. Petersburg, Fla., – another sale-leaseback. “The industry is undergoing a lot of change; banks don’t require the huge footprint they once occupied,” Lindberg said. “Now many of them are looking at long-term sale-leasebacks. A large brick-and-mortar building is no longer as necessary as it once was.” In response to this changing real estate market, some bank properties have been selling for uses other than banking. For example, a large medical office building is under construction on the site of the St. Petersburg bank whose sale Lindberg managed in May 2021.  The main driver of the current industry change is the widespread consumer shift from traditional banking to online banking, Lindberg said. “A lot of people no longer even own a checkbook,” he said. “Because so many people bank online, there just aren’t many who need to go into a bank building anymore.”

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