Regions Bank has leased an additional 23,000 square feet at Regions Plaza in Midtown, bringing its footprint in the namesake tower to roughly 122,000 square feet across five floors. In an office market where the headlines still skew toward contraction, the Birmingham, Alabama-based regional bank is expanding.
The new floor is under renovation and should open by the end of September. It will hold about 190 employees working in technology, operations, digital and data — all of them previously remote, all of them moving to a hybrid schedule. Regions plans to renovate its other four floors in sequence after that. A permit application filed last week with the city of Atlanta covers the 11th floor and estimates that work at $3.3 million. Chairman and CEO John Turner said the interior work will prioritize collaboration, and that placing the nearly 20 Regions executives based in Atlanta on a single floor should improve communication and outcomes.
The bank is hiring across commercial banking, wealth banking, capital markets, real estate, small business and consumer, though officials did not say how many people they plan to add. Regions currently employs 1,300 people across metro Atlanta, including staff at its 71 area branches, with 600 in the Midtown office. It ranks eighth among Atlanta banks with $10.2 billion in local deposits as of mid-2025.
Turner framed the expansion as a bet on the market's size and proximity. \"Atlanta is just a tremendous market — almost over $240 billion in marketwide deposits, two hours away from our headquarter city of Birmingham,\" he said, calling it the preeminent city in the South and an opportunity to recruit talent.
The competitive picture is getting busier. Pinnacle Financial Partners recently signed a corporate headquarters lease at a new office tower on Spring Street, down the road from Regions Plaza. Turner said the competition comes from every direction — big banks, other regionals, community banks and fintechs like SoFi. Mary Beth Coke, hired as Regions' Atlanta market head in 2024, argued that consistency is the differentiator in a market absorbing both new entrants and merger disruption among long-standing players.
Regions first leased space in the tower on West Peachtree — the building next to the taller One Atlantic Center, known locally as the \"Mini Me\" — in 2011, and renewed for another 14 years in 2022. PGIM Real Estate, a division of Prudential Financial, has owned Regions Plaza since 2017, paying $176 million, or nearly $350 per square foot.
Original reporting: Atlanta Business Chronicle (2026-08-11)