photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

The building at 714 Vermont St. is pictured on Friday, June 5, 2026.

Alarm.com, a smart home tech firm, will be getting some help from the City of Lawrence to redevelop a downtown building into its new office space.

At its meeting on Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission voted 5-0 to approve incentives for the company’s project at 714 Vermont St.: a Neighborhood Revitalization Area property tax rebate, and Industrial Revenue Bonds for a sales tax exemption on construction materials.

Alarm.com had originally requested a 95% property tax rebate for a period of 15 years. But city staff, after evaluating the request, instead recommended an 80% property tax rebate for 10 years, and the commission went with staff’s recommendation.

Bill Fleming, an attorney representing Alarm.com, said the historic building, which was built in the 1940s and was once a car dealership, might be familiar to those who’d seen the 1962 movie “Carnival of Souls,” which was partially shot in Lawrence. “This building was there (in the film),” he said. “It existed, it was built in 1948.”

“The building’s been there for a long time, and now it’s time to do something cool with it and renovate it and update it,” Fleming said.

City staff estimates that the city’s portion of the property tax rebate could total approximately $162,000 over a 10-year period, but the actual amount would depend on the property’s future assessed valuation and the city’s property tax rate. The Industrial Revenue Bonds for a sales tax exemption on construction materials, meanwhile, are estimated to have an impact of $4,100 on the city’s sales taxes.

The Alarm.com team told the commission on Tuesday that some employees had already moved to Lawrence from offices elsewhere in the country. from as far away as Minnesota, Denver, or Austin, Texas. And they expect to grow their workforce, currently at about 40 people in Lawrence, by about 30 employees in the future.

Commissioner Kristine Polian asked how long it might take for that growth to materialize, and the Alarm.com team said it could happen over two years.

Alarm.com is investing about $2.5 million to renovate the Vermont Street building, which most recently housed the Climb Lawrence rock climbing gym, and it will provide about 13,000 square feet of space for this growth.

Mayor Brad Finkeldei said that as someone whose day job is downtown, he appreciates the difficulty of finding suitable office space there. He said that it’s “very difficult to find new space,” especially the highest-quality “class A” spots.

“It is not true that there’s class A space available in downtown Lawrence,” Finkeldei said.

Alarm.com, a publicly traded company, had its first presence in Lawrence in 2019 with just three employees, and then opened an office in 2021 in the second-floor space above the Sylas and Maddy’s Ice Cream shop at 11th and Massachusetts streets. Before it decided on the Vermont Street site, the company was considering the former Journal-World printing facility at the north end of Massachusetts Street as a potential headquarters site.