See inside LendingTree’s hip new South End HQ

The fintech company’s new headquarters are in one of the two towers at Vantage South End, a new development by The Spectrum Cos. on South Tryon and Carson.

Details: The open-concept space is filled with plush couches, small gathering spaces, live houseplants, artwork by local artists, custom furniture, break rooms with cold brew taps and dozens of other features to make it feel homey, says Kelsey Tennyson, a special projects associate at LendingTree.

• Designers of the space call the vibe a mix between resident and commercial — or “resimercial.”

Zoom out: CEO Doug Lebda founded LendingTree in 1996. It’s an online marketplace that lets borrowers comparison shop for various types of loans, from mortgages to student refinances. LendingTree has been growing rapidly in recent years and especially since late 2018, when the company announced plans to nearly double its local footprint in exchange for more than $10 million in state and local incentives.

Some of LendingTree’s new HQ’s notable amenities include:

• A huge town hall space for all-staff meetings.
• 771 employee workstations.
• 64 enclosed conference rooms and 27 collaboration spaces.
• A meditation room and a game room.
• Five outdoor patios including one on the rooftop with skyline and stadium views.
• Four libraries with rentable books.
• An on-site health clinic.
• Locker rooms and showers.
• An “Instagram wall” complete with a giant green throne and crown.
• State-of-the-art video conferencing technology.

By the numbers: The sleek new offices span floors 6-11, taking up more than 176,000 square feet of the new tower. This dwarfs LendingTree’s old HQ offices, which occupied about 63,000 square feet across multiple offices in Ballantyne.

The space was already in the works long before the pandemic. But LendingTree did design a few elements of its new space with Covid in mind, Tennyson says, including the addition of partitions between workspaces. LendingTree is telling employees they can come back when they are comfortable doing so.

Zoom out: In moving to South End, LendingTree has said the goal is to be more centrally located, in an area that’s walkable to public transportation and close to where employees live. Vantage South End is the latest project that’s quickly turning the neighborhood into one of the hottest office submarkets in the nation.

The architect behind the space was Redline Design Group. Kelley Vieregg Design handled the interior design along with Redline.

Here’s a look around: