Come July, the Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau will move from its current home in the historic Zook House near the Exton Square mall to a new borough office building being built by the MacElree Harvey law firm.

The CCCVB's five-year lease at the 2,400-square-foot Zook House expires June 30.

The bureau and its six full-time employees will move back to the borough sometime in July, where the organization first had its office when it began in 1963, said Jesse Walters, CCCVB president since 1998.

The group will occupy the entire fourth floor of the new five-story MacElree Harvey building, actually an addition to the law firm's current headquarters that faces the unit block of West Miner Street. MacElree Harvey has already moved into the first two floors of the new building and is seeking tenants for the third and fifth floors, according to Lance Nelson, MacElree Harvey managing partner.

CCCVB will pay $19 a square foot for its new 2,700-square-foot space, whose address is 17 Wilmont Mews, Walters said. The term of the lease is five years.

Commented Nelson, "This law firm is thrilled to have the visitors' bureau as a tenant. And, putting on my hat as chairman of the West Chester Business Improvement District, we're delighted that the bureau is returning to West Chester."

Said Walters of the impetus behind the move, "We came to grips with the fact that we need more functional office space."

He noted that CCCVB had anticipated much more walk-in traffic at Exton Square than what actually materialized.

Walters doesn't believe the new office will have that many drop-ins either, though a CCCVB sign will probably be erected outside.

"The Internet has changed the way people research travel," Walters explained late last week. "The number of people dropping by our Longwood Gardens visitors center has dropped every year since I started here, as have phone calls, even though hotel occupancy and Longwood visits reached a peak in 2004.

"People are getting the tourism information they need, just not in the typical old-fashioned ways."

Unique visits to the organization's Web site increased 20 percent between 2003 and 2004, from 66,000 in 2003 to 79,300 in 2004.

The Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust owns Exton Square and with it the Zook House.

PREIT bought Exton Square and five other regional malls in April 2003 from the Rouse Co. of Columbia, Md., for $548 million in cash, securities and assumed debt.

The visitors' bureau sent its letter to PREIT notifying the publicly traded real estate investment trust of its intention to move.

Plans for the two-story Zook House, built in 1750 and moved 200 feet closer to Route 30 in 1998 when Exton Square was expanded, were not immediately available.

This article originally appeared in The Daily Local News.