The 16-story, 261,000-square-foot office building at 5151 E. Broadway opened in 1975.

 Rick Wiley,

Arizona

Daily Star

What began as a relocation for one remote worker seeking a better cost of living has turned into a California company expanding into Tucson.

Advanced Financial Co., based in Carlsbad, California, is a 27-year-old company that handles billing for resorts and timeshare mortgages.

In March 2020, in response to the pandemic, the company pivoted to remote work and some of its employees relocated.

One came to Tucson.

“Tucson wasn’t on our radar,” said Kyle Kolsky, chief operating officer for Advanced Financial. “I had never even been there before.”

Aside from bragging about the weather and cost of living, the employee was using space inside one of Tucson’s most iconic office buildings and one of the city’s first high-rises, 5151 E. Broadway.

“He would tell us, ‘It’s not as hot as everybody says and we bought a house right when we got here,’” Kolsky recalled. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

The company’s entry level pay is $17 an hour with potential to climb up to $30 an hour.

“In California, it’s super expensive,” Kolsky said. “We didn’t lower our salaries, we just exported them to Tucson.”

Advanced Financial Company’s facility in Carlsbad, California, is 45,000 square feet. The company is expanding to Tucson after it was lured here by one of its remote workers.

He said other employees began expressing interest in Tucson and two managers moved here to open an office and have since hired 12 team members with plans to grow to 20 this year.

“We found that Tucson is a great market for finding workers,” Kolsky said. “Tucson’s got its own culture and economy and snowbirds and the university — it’s 10 Palm Springs put together.”

Being in the 5151 E. Broadway building was a plus.

“We like having a fun, vintage building,” Kolsky said.

Developed in 1973 by Philip Wise of New York and Tucson’s Joe Cesare, president of Broadway Realty and Trust Co., the building was formerly known as the Great Western Bank Building.

The Great Western Bank building, 5151 E. Broadway, is seen during construction in 1973.

It is 17 stories tall and, at 261,000 square feet, still one of the largest office buildings in Tucson.

Scott Seldin bought the building in 2009.

“It’s a great story for Tucson,” Seldin said. “For a small, dynamic company this is a much nicer place to live and is affordable.”

The pandemic’s impact on office buildings was particularly troubling, Seldin said.

“A lot of people were scratching their heads about what was going to happen with offices in the future,” he said. “But now people are anxious to get out of their homes and maybe work three days a week at the office, then from home.”

In response to COVID-19, Seldin upgraded 5151 E. Broadway with features such as a destination dispatch elevator, where tenants select a floor and get assigned an elevator destined to their floor instead of sharing a car with several other people.

Air filters were also upgraded and the 16th-floor conference room has been enhanced as a tenant perk for meetings or gatherings.

The building is mainly offices with a small retail presence on the ground floor — coffee and pastries.

Tenants include mortgage brokers, insurance companies and incubators for small companies.

Mark Isenberger, with Picor Commercial Real Estate Services, is the property manager at 5151 E. Broadway.

He said the property is currently about 70% occupied.

“We have a big pipeline of deals in different stages of negotiations,” he said. “It’s an extraordinarily busy and bizarre time.”

The building’s staff continued to work onsite during the pandemic.

“You can’t plunge a toilet remotely,” Isenberger joked. “But it was eerie to arrive and the parking lot, with about 1,000 spaces, had maybe five cars.”

The conference room on the 16th floor at 5151 E. Broadway has a sweeping view of the Santa Catalina Mountains and is open for use by any tenant and for rental by the outside organizations.

Aside from the elevators and conference room upgrades, the pandemic offered the building management a chance to make some cosmetic touch-ups and add two level-three charging stations for electric vehicles.

Isenberger, a Tucson native, relocated to Los Angeles until his return in 2018 to manage 5151 E. Broadway.

He appreciates being part of a team that has lured a California company to Tucson.

“I consider myself a California refugee,” Isenberger said. “I would like to bring as many people from California here as I can.”

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Contact reporter Gabriela Rico at grico@tucson.com