A national home security company is beefing up its office footprint in Innsbrook as it rolls out a new surveillance service.
SimpliSafe, which makes and sells wireless home security systems and also provides monitoring services for customers, has inked a lease on an additional 8,000 square feet in the Highwoods Three office building at 4840 Cox Road.
The Innsbrook facility is a monitoring center, where employees keep tabs on customers’ in-home security systems and are able to dispatch emergency services if needed. The expansion of the center is driven largely by the rollout of a new outdoor security service being introduced by SimpliSafe, spokesperson Ai-Li Lim said in a recent interview.
Last month, SimpliSafe launched a pilot of the new service, which brings the company’s monitoring operations to the perimeter of customers’ houses. A wider rollout is anticipated later this year.
Equipment and personnel involved in that new monitoring program will be based in the Innsbrook office’s newly secured space, which is expected to be occupied before summer 2025, the company said.
With the new square footage, the company’s original lease of 16,000 square feet increases to 24,000 square feet on Cox Road. SimpliSafe spent more than $3 million to establish the center several years ago.
The company declined to say how much it will spend on the expansion. HITT Contracting has been tapped to handle the buildout of the new space.
SimpliSafe currently has 175 to 200 employees at its Innsbrook center and is expected to hire more as part of the implementation of the new outdoor monitoring service, though exactly how many more hasn’t been determined, Lim said.
When the monitoring center was announced in 2021, the company said at the time it planned to have more than 250 employees there.
SimpliSafe, which is headquartered in Boston, first planted its flag in the local area with a customer support call center in the former Miller & Rhoads building at Willow Lawn, where the company continues to occupy 60,000 square feet. The Willow Lawn outpost opened in 2020 and currently has 300 to 325 employees, with an eventual goal of 572 employees.