A publicly traded trucking company is expanding its footprint in the region, a move driven by its work with the shipment of containers that come into the Port of Wilmington.

Old Dominion Freight Line Inc. (NASDAQ: ODFL) bought about 5 acres of industrial-zoned property at 714 Sunnyvale Drive off Carolina Beach Road in Wilmington this month for $435,000, according to a deed recorded in New Hanover County.

The company currently has a facility at 3327 Fredrickson Road near U.S. 421, where it will continue to operate local pick-ups and deliveries, and it is renovating the office at its new Sunnyvale Drive location, said Terry Hutchins, vice president of real estate for Old Dominion Freight Line.

"It just got too crowded [at Fredrickson Road] so we're going to move the container [activities] over to there when we finish the office . . . We had too much business for the one facility," he said Thursday.

Wilmington brokers Tyler Pegg and Cody Cress of The CRESS Group of Coldwell Banker Commercial SunCoast represented the seller of the Sunnyvale Drive property, Seven Twenty Sunnyvale LLC, in the transaction. Eric McFarlin of Burr & Temkin, a real estate company that specializes in properties for the transportation industry and has offices in Greensboro and throughout the U.S., represented Old Dominion Freight Line.  

Founded with one truck in Virginia in 1934, Old Dominion Freight Line's current corporate office is in Thomasville.

"We've had a lot of growth" nationwide, Hutchins said, explaining that the company's revenue has increased from $500 million in 2002 to close to $3 billion today.

Old Dominion Freight Line's new Sunnyvale Drive facility will be a 16-door terminal, meaning there will be 16 places for a driver to pull up a trailer and unload a shipment, Hutchins explained. The container-shipped goods Old Dominion transports with the chassis and tractors the company owns are mainly items from overseas "that would later be turned around and re-sold to the public in some manner," such as clothing, he said. Those containers, usually owned by steam ship lines, then have to be returned within a certain amount of time.

The firm will only be using about an acre of the Sunnyvale Drive property to start, Hutchins said, but the additional acreage provides room to expand further. When Old Dominion Freight Line moved from a rental property in Wilmington after buying the Fredrickson Road facility in 1998, the company had about five or six local employees, a number that has grown to 50 over the years, Hutchins said.

That number will be split between the two locations, with the expectation that as the company continues to grow the employee number - both office workers and drivers - at each site could double, he said. 

Driver salaries range between $50,000 and $100,000 a year plus benefits, Hutchins said.