Paylocity to grow at Ten Mile Crossing

Paylocity opened its first Treasure Valley office in downtown Boise knowing from before Day One that its C.W. Moore Plaza tenancy would be short-term.

Long-term would be somewhere else in the Treasure Valley.

Paylocity landed on the Ten Mile Crossing development, a project still in its infancy at the Interstate 84 and Ten Mile Road interchange in Meridian.

Paylocity will lease 62,000 square feet at Ten Mile Crossing, enough to expand to 400 employees with opportunity to expand into more space at the 75-acre development, said Jay Schedler, Paylocity’s vice president of human resources.

Paylocity, a payroll and human resources software company launched in 1997, and opened a Boise office in January 2016 with 12 to 15 employees. It now has 110 employees with plans to grow to 400 or more, Schedler said.

Meridian could become Paylocity’s second-largest office behind its Arlington Heights, Ill., headquarters, which itself is relocating to the nearby Chicago suburb of Schaumburg to double its square footage. Paylocity’s second-largest office now is in Lake Mary, Fla., near Orlando, with other smaller offices in Rochester, N.Y., Nashua, N.H., Springfield, N.J. and Oakland, Calif.

Paylocity has 2,050 employees, Schedler said.

Paylocity will join the first tenants to commit to the Brighton Corp./Gardner Co. Ten Mile Crossing collaboration, the first major development at what is considered the most expansive, undeveloped, urban freeway interchange between Portland and Salt Lake City.

The other tenants for the first two office buildings in the works are benefits administrator AmeriBen and Horrocks Engineering. Brighton plans to move its offices to Ten Mile Crossing.

The two-story, 70,000-square-foot AmeriBen building is expected to be completed in July, while the second building for Paylocity, Brighton and Horrocks won’t be complete until May 2018, said David Turnbull, CEO at Brighton Corp.

Paylocity changed the game plan for Brighton/Gardner, which originally planned the second building for two stories and 64,000 square feet. It was recently redesigned for five stories and 127,000 square feet. Ten Mile Crossing could ultimately have 1.3 million square feet of office space, Turnbull said.

Paylocity is following a familiar Treasure Valley refrain pitting the urban downtown setting at the eastern edge of the valley to the wide-open acreage at the center of the valley.

“C.W. Moore Plaza was not our long-term location,” Schedler said. “There’s a parking challenge, and it’s real for us. We subsidize all the parking. It seemed being in the center of the valley makes a lot of sense.”

Back when Paylocity had 60 employees in Boise, the company determined about 40 percent lived in Meridian or west, 20 percent in eastern Meridian or Boise’s west side, and 30 percent near downtown or southeast Boise, Schedler said.

When looking for a new office location, Paylocity considered 300 cities. The list was quickly narrowed to three dozen and then one dozen, with Boise rising to the top.

Schedler ticked off factors such as quality of life, education, labor, housing and the preference of college graduates to remain to convince Paylocity to commit to Boise. The Idaho Department of Labor determined that 69 percent of in-state students graduating from Boise State University remain in Idaho for at least four years, which chief research officer Bob Uhlenkott regards as “pretty good” retention.

“Boise was absolutely our best choice,” Schedler said. “Boise was everything we were looking for.”

The Idaho Department of Commerce also likes Paylocity, awarding the company the third highest Tax Reimbursement Incentive to date with a 28 percent tax credit over 15 years valued at $6.5 million. Commerce projects $35 million in new state revenue from Paylocity, the fifth-highest amount from the 36 companies awarded a TRI since the program’s launch in July 2014.