Ally Financial leases 3 more floors in namesake Detroit skyscraper downtown

Ally Financial Inc. is taking more space in the downtown Detroit skyscraper that bears its name.

A spokesperson for the financial services company said it is adding three floors to its footprint in the Ally Detroit Center building, formerly One Detroit Center, at 500 Woodward Ave. which is owned by Dan Gilbert's Detroit-based Bedrock LLC.

Ally didn't disclose precise details about the space addition and Bedrock declined to, although CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate information service, says Ally currently occupies 317,000 square feet on the third through 10th floors, the 14th through 20th floors and the 24th floor.

A typical floor in the building is about 25,600 square feet, CoStar says, meaning that Ally would be adding close to 77,000 square feet.

"Approximately 250 employees from our Troy office will transition to the newly added space by the end of January 2022, and the additional capacity will be used to accommodate growth we are forecasting in the region," Jillian Palash, director of corporate communications, said in an email to Crain's on Monday afternoon.

According to CoStar, Ally Financial takes about 43,000 square feet in the Troy Technology Park building at 1960 Technology Drive in a lease that expires in December. It is the largest tenant in that 83,800-square-foot building.

The newly added space is something of an anomaly during the COVID-19 pandemic as many companies have kept their employees working at home and have shrunk office footprints or eliminated them entirely, giving space up for sublease.

One notable exception is Plante Moran. The accounting, tax advisory, real estate and wealth management firm shuttered its owned 125,000-square-foot office at 27400 Northwestern Highway in the Victor Center building, put it up for sale for an undisclosed price and leased an additional eight floors in the Southfield Town Center in addition to the four it already uses, bringing its footprint there to 192,600 square feet, up from 50,200.

Gilbert paid $100 million for Ally Detroit Center and its 2,070-space parking deck in 2015 and lured Ally Financial, the bank that was at one time General Motors Accepance Corp., there from the Renaissance Center. That kept the company from relocating to the suburbs as it had considered. Ally Financial had been mulling space in the 2.2 million-square-foot Southfield Town Center, as well as build-to-suit.