Welty Enterprises will move its headquarters from Fairlawn to downtown Akron, relocating about 130 employees into the historic Old Akron Post Office at 165 E. Market St., the company announced in a news release reported by the Akron Beacon Journal on Thursday, November 12.
The firm, which employs more than 300 professionals across six operating companies, plans to complete the move by the end of the second quarter of 2027. Its current headquarters sits on Ridgewood Road in Fairlawn, the suburban community northwest of Akron where a number of the region’s professional firms have clustered for decades.
“We are excited to further build upon our commitment to the City of Akron and to the success and vitality of its downtown core,” Welty Enterprises Chairman and CEO Don Taylor said in a prepared statement quoted by the Akron Beacon Journal. “We believe the building’s unique and long history of success matches our own, and we look forward to using it as a foundation for continued growth and enhanced experiences for our employees, customers, and community.”
Taylor said the relocation will raise Welty’s total investment in downtown Akron to about $100 million, a figure that includes earlier projects such as the Bowery development. Welty is a builder and developer with more than 80 years in business, and it has managed large projects for Goodyear, FirstEnergy, Akron Children’s Hospital, GOJO Industries, the University of Akron and the Akron Art Museum, the Beacon Journal reported.
The new headquarters building carries its own history. The Old Post Office opened in 1929 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Welty has owned the 67,000-square-foot property since 2005 and invested about $9 million in a major adaptive redesign in 2007, according to the company’s release.
Most recently the building was leased by Energy Harbor, the former FirstEnergy Solutions, which was acquired by Texas-based Vistra Corp. in 2024. Vistra has kept a regional office there but will relocate to Fairlawn by the end of this year — effectively swapping places with Welty, Taylor told the Akron Beacon Journal.
Akron Mayor Shammas Malik welcomed the announcement. “Bringing approximately 130 employees downtown will support our local restaurants and small businesses, add energy to our streets, and build on the momentum we’ve worked hard to create,” Malik said in a prepared statement quoted by the Akron Beacon Journal, calling the decision “great news for our city and another sign of confidence in downtown’s future.”
The move continues a two-way street between downtown and the suburbs. While FirstEnergy has shifted main operations away from the core, law firm Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs this year returned from Fairlawn to the AES Building on South Main Street, the Beacon Journal reported. Downtown investment has been a running theme in Akron this fall, including the new Trailhead Foundation preparing its first grants from the Summa Health sale.
Not every Welty project is moving at the same speed. Taylor told the Akron Beacon Journal last week that the company’s plan to redevelop the downtown CitiCenter Building for commercial and residential uses is on pause following Akron voters’ November 3 passage of charter amendments on renter security deposits and criminal histories.
Welty Enterprises operates through six companies: Welty Development, Welty Construction, inSITE Advisory Group, Environments for Business, Welty Energy & Infrastructure and Welty Generation Solutions. The headquarters group moving downtown — about 130 of the firm’s professionals — will be working from the Market Street building once the relocation is finished next year.
The headquarters decision also settles the building’s next chapter after a long run as someone else’s office. Welty bought the Old Post Office in 2005, two decades after it joined the National Register of Historic Places, and its 2007 redesign converted the 1929 federal building into modern office space while keeping its historic character — the same character Taylor cited in explaining why the company chose it for its own nameplate. Energy Harbor’s lease carried the building through the FirstEnergy Solutions spinoff in 2020 and the Vistra acquisition in 2024, and Vistra’s planned move to Fairlawn by year’s end is what opens the space for Welty’s own staff.
For downtown Akron, 130 headquarters employees is a meaningful daily population: workers who eat lunch downtown, park downtown and give the restaurants and small businesses Malik mentioned a steadier weekday customer base. It is also a statement from a firm whose business is building other organizations’ projects across the region — Welty’s project list for Akron institutions runs from Goodyear and GOJO to Akron Children’s Hospital and the Akron Art Museum — that its own long-term address belongs in the city center rather than the suburbs.
What happens next is the build-out and the move itself, on the company’s stated timeline of the second quarter of 2027, and the question of what backfills the Fairlawn space Welty leaves behind — the same space Vistra’s regional office is moving into as the two companies trade places across the city line.