By Stan Bullard

In a fitting move for a company that deals with real estate developers and brokers, software producer Intuit Real Estate Solutions has set up shop in the former OfficeMax Business Center in Highland Hills and has claimed naming rights to the building.

Intuit is scheduled to complete the move today, Feb. 14, of 214 employees to the 6-year-old structure from the building it has occupied at 29345 Mercantile Road in Beachwood. The company has taken 53,000 square feet in its new home at 20800 Harvard Road. That's up 13% from 47,000 square feet in its former space.

Intuit needed room to grow and wanted to replace dated offices with a largely open-office environment that's better suited to its operations, said Intuit Real Estate president Robert Ballou.

The new office includes a "think room" with a 100-foot long continuous white board that employees can use to develop their ideas in teams, and a "quiet room" that's insulated from outside noise, light and other distractions, Mr. Ballou said. The new office also allows the company to add improved laboratories to work with visiting customers on software.

"These things are quite common in the Intuit environment" and required space the company didn't have in Beachwood, Mr. Ballou said.

Intuit Inc. is based in Mountain View, Calif. It gained a presence in Greater Cleveland when it acquired the former Management Reports International in 2002 and changed the unit's name to Intuit Real Estate Solutions.

Intuit Real Estate provides accounting and property data software for clients such as Prudential Real Estate Investors of Newark, N.J., CB Richard Ellis of Los Angeles, and various real estate investment trusts. The predecessor Management Reports provided mainframe computer services, but expanded to include desktop and web-based services, Mr. Ballou said.

Intuit landed at the former OfficeMax building because Duke Realty Corp. converted the structure to multitenant use and gave Intuit rights to expand there in the future, Mr. Ballou said.

The Staubach Co., which represents Intuit nationally, represented it here through its Cleveland office.

Landing Intuit as a tenant means Duke has filled half the 107,000-square-foot building, said Wayne Lingafelder, Duke senior vice president. Duke paid $8.35 million last September for the building, which was sold following the 2003 merger of OfficeMax with Boise Cascade Corp.

The combined company consolidated its Cleveland-area operations in Shaker Heights. Highland Hills' gain is Beachwood's loss. Tom Sudow, executive director of the Beachwood Chamber of Commerce, said his organization and the city of Beachwood presented multiple options to Intuit, but it opted for the newer building where it inherits benefits from a property tax abatement.

Neither Mr. Lingafelder nor Mr. Ballou would disclose terms of the lease.