Best Software Plans Estimated $24M Campus

The single-story buildings on an 18-acre site probably will be built at a hard construction cost of at least $150 per sf or a total $24 million, area construction industry sources tell GlobeSt.com. One building will serve as a call center and the other, a corporate suite, according to preliminary plans filed with Gwinnett County's planning board. Best has 650 employees working at two existing buildings near the 1.24-million-sf Gwinnett Place Mall. Those employees will move into the corporate suite after the building is completed. The company expects to grow its staff to 900 over the next several years, Best officials say. Worldwide, Best has 8,000 employees.

Best's North American operations reported 2004 revenue of $517 million. Best's corporate neighbors at Huntcrest will be Motorola and BioLab, a pool chemical supplier. Best entered the Atlanta market in 1999 with the purchase of 23-year-old, locally based Peachtree Software.

Best's plans come a month after the Gary Holding Group of Suwanee purchased a prime 54-acre tract for an estimated $6 million near Interstate 85 and Sugarloaf Parkway, as GlobeSt.com previously reported.

The developer plans to break ground in March on what will be metro Atlanta's newest and largest office park corridor--a 500,000-sf spec-built campus on a route that leads directly to the state's largest mall, the 1.9-million-sf Mall of Georgia.