Piedmont is the former Wells REIT, which was first established by native Georgian Leo Wells back in 1998. It controls a $4 billion portfolio of office buildings nationwide, including a few marquee properties like the Aon Center in downtown Chicago and the Nestle headquarters in Los Angeles.

In 2007, Piedmont was spun off into a separate, self-managed entity under the guidance of CEO Don Miller.

Throughout much of this decade, Wells came under intense scrutiny from a variety of pundits who were skeptical of the so-called “private REIT” industry. That moniker was a misnomer anyway, since the Wells REIT and follow-on Wells REIT II were both structured as public companies but were not traded on any major stock exchange.