Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

October 05, 2009

Ex-FEMA Mississippi Contact Center for Sale

By Brendan B. Read


Need a U.S. contact center in an excellent labor market that is disaster-ready? Developer ProVision is offering what it calls the “unique” former Federal Emergency Management Agency facility in Long Beach, Miss.
 
The center, branded as the Long Beach Call Center, has just over 19,000 square feet and was built in 2005 - the same year that Hurricane Katrina devastated this community. When FEMA vacated the site couple of years later it became home to vacuum cleaner maker Oreck’s customer service division and from September 2008 to December 2008 by the Department of Homeland Security. ProVisions purchased it in 2007.
 
The building occupies about four acres and can accommodate both single and multi-tenant uses. Given the contact center’s heritage the building has ample backup power: a 500 KW Perkins diesel generator, 1,000 gallon base tank with auto transfer switch. The location is relatively protected but it also well suited for evacuation if it came to that again; it is in the Long Beach Industrial Park, which is well inland and close to I-10. The telecom connectivity is solid; there are 150 phone lines into the building.
 
There are no worries about shift-change horn-rendered ‘musical parking spaces’ at the Long Beach Call Center. Its parking lot contains more than 200 slots giving it a ratio of 11 spaces per 1,000 square feet of building area (11:1): more than 50 percent the typical ratios of 6:1 and 7:1 in found at contact centers. The air conditioning system is more than adequate to handle the breathing-cotton hot humid air of the Southeast; it has a set of 57.5 ton carrier units designed for high-density configurations.
 
There is excellent labor availability. Long Beach is in the Gulfport-Biloxi Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has nearly 250,000 residents; Long Beach itself has more than 17,000 inhabitants. ProVisions said the state has a 10.5 percent unemployment rate. The state, it said, is very supportive of business investment, citing the Mississippi Broadband Technology Development Act and the Mississippi Advantage Jobs Incentive Program.
 
The developer is banking on Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that customer service representative employment is projected to increase by 21 percent or more between 2006 and 2016, especially that in contact centers.
 
“With state-of-the-art capabilities and strategic location on the Gulf Coast, the Long Beach Call Center has the potential to become a workplace for professionals with a predicted increase in job opportunities,” the firm said.

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Amy Tierney


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