RICHARDSON, Texas — Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the Dallas Business Journal in June. On July 10, the NRA said in a statement that it is not planning to relocate to Richardson.
In its hunt to relocate its headquarters from Virginia to Texas, the National Rifle Association has scoped out office space in Richardson that State Farm Insurance is trying to unload.
The NRA’s headquarters is currently in Fairfax, Virginia. The gun rights organization is searching for 200,000 to 300,000 square feet of office space to house its new headquarters, said Dallas-Fort Worth commercial real estate veteran Steve Triolet, senior vice president of Research and Market Forecasting Operations for Partners Real Estate.
“They’ve toured the State Farm facility in Richardson,” said Triolet, who is based in Dallas. “They’ve got it down to a shorter list where they have physically inspected properties. That doesn't mean that they will ultimately land in Richardson or Dallas-Fort Worth. They could go somewhere else in Texas.”
The NRA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2021 to reorganize its business and said it plans to register as a nonprofit in Texas. The association has been a registered nonprofit in New York for more than 150 years, even though its physical headquarters is in northern Virginia.
In May 2021, Judge Harlin Hale of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas dismissed the NRA’s petition for bankruptcy reorganization, but the association said afterward it is still exploring a headquarters move to Texas, where it has more than 400,000 members. The group has more than 5 million members nationwide.
The NRA has hired commercial real estate firm Colliers to lease and potentially purchase an office building in DFW for its new headquarters, according to a June 20 report by real estate information service CoStar.
“Texas heads the list” for the NRA’s potential headquarters relocation, an association spokesman told CoStar in an email, according to the June 20 article.
Triolet said he thinks DFW is the frontrunner to land the NRA headquarters, followed by Houston, then San Antonio.
Illinois-based State Farm has four high-rise office towers in the large CityLine development at President George Bush Turnpike and Plano Road in Richardson and is looking ideally to sublease one or two of them to a single tenant per building, Triolet said. The buildings total more than 2 million square feet, and all four are about the same size.
“They don’t want to carve them up,” Triolet said. “They're looking for a user to take one or potentially more than one of those properties. That's hard to find.”
State Farm has far fewer workers in the CityLine buildings than before the pandemic and has publicly said it’s seeking to downsize its office footprint nationwide. Since the pandemic, the insurer has outsourced some jobs and adopted a more flexible office working environment in Richardson and nationally.
Triolet said that State Farm employees occupy less than half of the total space in the four Richardson towers on an average day.
“They could easily get rid of two buildings if they wanted to and they can find a taker,” he said.
The NRA has strong ties to Texas and its membership concentration in the state. The association will hold its 2024 annual meeting in Dallas next May and held its 2022 annual meeting in Houston.
The association has been embroiled in a legal showdown in New York since 2020, when Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the organization. The suit alleges the NRA illegally diverted millions of dollars from the group's charitable mission to benefit senior leadership, close associates and friends. A trial is tentatively scheduled for this fall.
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