By Steve Brown | Real Estate Editor
Dallas Morning News
stevebrown@dallasnews.com

Insurance giant State Farm has signed yet another big office lease in
Richardson.

The company — which already has more than 600,000 square feet in the Telecom
Corridor — has rented the two-building Lakeside office campus on North Central
Expressway north of Campbell Road.

State Farm officials confirm the deal is done.

“We have signed off on the lease,” spokesman Gary Stephenson said Friday.

State Farm is leasing more than 800,000 square feet of former Nortel Networks
office space.

Part of the offices State Farm will move into have been occupied by Ericsson,
which is finishing work on a new building at its campus in Plano. Ericsson is
relocating workers to the Legacy business park, freeing up room for State Farm,
real estate agents say.

The office space State Farm just rented is south of where the Illinois-based
insurance company is building a new regional campus at North Central and State
Highway 190.

State Farm’s Richardson project won’t open for more than a year and is
expected to include more than 2 million square feet. The operations center —
being developed by KDC — will employ thousands of workers.

In less than a year, State Farm has gobbled up more than 2 million square
feet of North Texas office space.

Starting last August, it leased a 290,000-square-foot office building in the
Galatyn Park complex in Richardson. Then in January, the company rented space in
two more office properties next door. It also leased a 400,000-square-foot
office space in Irving.

With the latest transaction, State Farm has more than 1.4 million square feet
in the Telecom Corridor — about the same amount of office space that’s in a
downtown Dallas skyscraper.

The Lakeside buildings that the insurance company rented in the latest deal
were purchased in 2011 by Dallas-based Pillar Commercial. Cawley Partners leases
the properties.

It’s unclear how much of the office space State Farm has taken in Richardson
is for short-term use. The company is expected to shift many of the workers in
those buildings to the new office campus on State Highway 190 when it opens.

Formal groundbreaking for the State Farm campus is set for July 11, though
construction began on the site in April.

State Farm officials have declined to provide many details or employment
numbers for the new Richardson operations.