DATE: Thursday, November 13, 1997           TAG: 9711130525

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MEREDITH COHN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   70 lines

UNION CAMP TO LOCATE NEW DIVISION IN NORFOLK RETAIL OFFICE PRODUCTS UNIT WILL SET UP SHOP AT TOWN POINT CENTER.

Union Camp Corp. announced plans Wednesday to move a newly created retail office products unit to Norfolk, expanding the company's focus on retail sales and furthering the city's efforts to revitalize the downtown area.

Wayne, N.J.-based Union Camp, one of the nation's 200 largest industrial companies with $4 billion in sales last year, created the Retail Papers Business Unit in July. About 25 executive, sales and support staff will move in February into top-of-the-line office space in the Town Point Center building on Boush Street. More than half of the workers will come from Franklin, where the company's Fine Paper Division is headquartered.

The paper maker created the unit to expand its share of the growing retail office products market, said Jack Plomgren, its new president. While Union Camp already sells to such national retail outlets as Home Depot, Staples and Wal-Mart, its primary market remains industrial users.

The new unit, with its separate headquarters, will help Union Camp begin selling to other retailers such as grocers and drug stores.

``It's a very different business than our industrial business,'' Plomgren said. ``We had in our minds some things we needed in a site, like access to an airport, a building with a large enough space for us to move into and expand.''

Plomgren said the company also looked in Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk and Franklin but settled on the Norfolk building because of the space available, expansion opportunities, location and the urban environment.

Union Camp expects the number of employees in the new retail unit could double within five years.

Union Camp never considered sites outside the region because 15 employees working for the unit live in Hampton Roads. Plomgren has lived in Norfolk for 14 years.

However, city officials tout the move to Norfolk as another sign of downtown's rebirth, along with new and developing facilities such as MacArthur Center Mall and Tidewater Community College.

``This is consistent with our strategy of trying to attract regional, national and international headquarters to downtown,'' said Roderick S. Woolard, Norfolk's director of development. ``Union Camp is a Fortune 500 company, and while it's not the full corporate headquarters, it's good to have another represented in our downtown.''

Norfolk Southern is the only Fortune 500 company in Norfolk.

The 130,000-square-foot Town Point Center, managed by Divaris Real Estate, has among the highest vacancy rates of ``Class A'' buildings downtown. The 7,000 square feet leased by Union Camp do not place the company in the building's top three largest tenants, but combined with expansions by MCI Telecommunications and Glenn & Sadler engineering and architectural firm, the building is the fullest it has been in years.

The vacancy rate is now around 9 percent among the half-dozen Class A buildings in Norfolk, many of which faced serious financial troubles in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of a poor economy. That's tight enough to begin pushing up rents, said Gresh Wall, Town Point Center's leasing agent at Divaris. Rates have already risen about $1 a square foot in several buildings downtown, he said.

Wall said Union Camp brings more prestige to Town Point Center and Norfolk. ``I think they chose us because the building is centrally located among the residential, retail and financial hubs of downtown,'' he said.

He also said the city accommodated Union Camp's parking needs in a public garage.

Donald R. Crigger, a senior vice president at Goodman Segar Hogan Hoffler commercial real estate, represented Union Camp in the search for a site. He said downtown is again a place to which businesses want to move.

``They very quickly decided that it was not a matter of downtown or not, it was which building downtown,'' he said. ``That was the environment they wanted and Town Point Center made a good deal. And who wouldn't want a Fortune 500 company of that size and financial stability?''

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