With the purchase of the old Gunter and Peel funeral home location at the corner of College and Ninth Street South, BankFirst now owns all the property on that block.

Chief Retail and Operations Officer Jim McAlexander said there are no immediate plans for the building, but the bank wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

“There are no definite plans other than retrofitting it to meet our future needs, future growth on the corporate side,” he said. “It’s not going to be a bank that opens up and customers come in, and we are always looking for opportunities for future growth. We contacted them to see if there was any interest in selling, and if there was we wanted to be first on the list.”

Corporate and operations offices, training rooms and other, similar spaces will likely go in the building, he said. The bank was also facing a parking problem.

The bank bought the 12,500 square-foot building in August, but continued to rent it to Memorial Gunter Peel Funeral Home while renovations were underway at its current Second Avenue North location, McAlexander said. The funeral home moved out in late January, and there is some minor work going on there now.

“We are demolishing the upstairs,” he said. “There was an apartment up there, and we’re opening up the second floor and taking it down to the studs.”

McAlexander said BankFirst bought the old Gunter and Peel annex building — which faces 10th Street South — back in 2016 and turned it into corporate office space. There are now about 30-35 offices in that space, and all but about five are empty.

“We’ve had five acquisitions in the past six or seven years, and we are continuing to look for ways to grow,” he said. “There are going to be more positions available here, and we want to have as much (space) as we can around where we are headquartered.”

A sense of collaboration is important, he said.

“One of the things we take into consideration is that when you do have (people) spread out there is an element of collaboration that you lose,” McAlexander said. “If I email you versus talk to you, you might read things into an email that aren’t there, or you might pick up the wrong tone. When we add people, we want them in Columbus as our first choice, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

The purchase is part of the bank’s general expansion, he said.

“We’ve acquired five (rural banks) since 2016,” he said. “Any time you have acquisitions, at some point in the future that scale and that growth is going to cause jobs on the operational and corporate side of things to some degree. As you grow, there’s more need for people to support that growth in the back room.”

McAlexander said the bank has about 64 employees in Columbus now, including about 30 banking workers, about 32 corporate jobs and four executive jobs. The total yearly payroll and benefits is about $6.4 million.