Toyota's North American CEO: $350M Plano campus will streamline business for the future (Video)

It's been about five weeks since Toyota North American CEO Jim Lentz closed on his Westlake home as he moves to North Texas to oversee the construction of the company's new $350 million corporate campus in Plano.

"There were tons of different choices," Lentz told the Dallas Business Journal in an exclusive interview Monday. "My wife and I actually looked at 82 or 84 homes over a two-weekend period and we finally landed on this place in Westlake."

The decision was difficult because there were four other properties in Dallas-Fort Worth under consideration by the Lentz family, he told me. Lentz declined to disclose his address, citing security concerns.

From his home in Westlake, Lentz will help orchestrate the company's new home under one roof, which will help streamline the company's business and facilitate its growth over the next half century, he said.

"The reason I moved as early as I have is that we have two big design processes going on right now," Lentz told me. "One is the overall design of the facility, so we are working with the architect to decide what the campus is going to look like. The other thing going on simultaneously is deciding what the organization structure will look like."

Toyota North American, a subsidiary of Toyota (NYSE: TM), plans to take its offices, including its corporate office in California and divisions in New York and Kentucky, and re-engineer them to be more efficient. Ultimately, about 4,000 jobs are expected to move to North Texas.

"We are not picking them up and dropping them into Plano as they are — we will be melding these organizations into one," Lentz told me. "If I have an HR group in each of these entities, we need to know what that will look like under one Toyota. We are working on both architecture and work design."

Lentz sat down with the Dallas Business Journal at Toyota's "Hello Texas" event in Plano — which was expected to cost in excess of $1 million — to discuss the company's move and where the company is headed after it steers its corporate offices to North Texas. Here's what he had to say:

How many employees will relocate to Texas and how many does Toyota plan to hire in North Texas?

Candace covers commercial and residential real estate and sports business.