Hagerty Returns 400 Employees to Downtown Traverse City Offices

Walk past Hagerty's glass-fronted headquarters on Rivers Edge Drive on any Tuesday this month and you'll see something largely absent since 2020: desks full of people. Nearly 400 employees of Traverse City's largest private employer completed their return to the downtown campus this week, finishing a two-phase reentry that began when company leadership transitioned back to hybrid schedules in late February.

The second phase added more than 200 employees to the daily headcount under a hybrid arrangement Hagerty calls "WorkForward," which requires staff in the building Tuesday through Thursday and allows remote work on Mondays and Fridays. Chief human resources officer Coco Champagne previously identified approximately 500 employees living within a 20-mile commuting radius of the downtown campus, the pool from which the current returnees are drawn.

For the businesses flanking Hagerty's headquarters, the math is immediate. Travis Baird, owner and general manager of Firefly, the sushi restaurant directly adjacent to Hagerty's building, welcomed the shift without hesitation. "It should only help local businesses, including ours, particularly during business hours, Monday through Friday, nine to five," Baird said.

Down the block at Archie's Social House, owner Jonathan Petrie had been counting down the days. "I definitely made it a point to mark it in my calendar," Petrie said. "That was a big deal." His restaurant, which opened two years ago, has largely held its own, but Petrie said weekday lunch traffic, especially through the off-season, still has room to grow. "In the off-season, we definitely have some room for growth in our lunch services during the week. And I think that's one of our hopes out of this happening."

The stakes are documented. A 2022 market assessment prepared for the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority found that downtown already had a below-average concentration of office workers and leaned disproportionately on Hagerty's presence to sustain economic activity. Harry Burkholder, the DDA's executive director, said the benefits of 400 workers back on the street won't stop at the nearest block. "People who work downtown, they eat at restaurants for lunch. And it's not just within a block radius," Burkholder said. He pointed to Traverse City's compact geography as a force multiplier: "A great thing about downtown Traverse City, it's within a 10-minute walk to just about everywhere. So I expect that impact to be felt throughout the entire downtown."

Traverse City's economy tilts heavily toward summer tourism, making predictable weekday spending from a sizable employer a meaningful stabilizer. The three-day-a-week cadence means parking demand on lower Front Street, lunchtime lines at restaurants from Firefly to Archie's, and coffee sales at the handful of downtown cafés could all see a structural, year-round lift rather than a seasonal one. Business owners said they were watching for that sustained pattern before drawing conclusions, but for the first time in five years, the foot-traffic trend is pointing in the right direction on a Wednesday afternoon.