“Wells Fargo has terminated its 375,000-square-foot lease at 155 Fifth St. in San Francisco, adding another empty building to an office leasing market with a nearly 20 percent vacancy rate.”
∙ Wells Fargo calls quits at S.F. office building [Business Times]
∙ San Francisco’s Office Availability Rate Up To 20 Percent In Q2 2009 [SocketSite]
I work for the bank and I believe the group that moved out of that Fifth St location just moved to other WF office space that was not being fully utilized. My group had to move out of a space at 333 Market to make room for some folks coming from Fifth St, and my team moved to fill in another formerly not completely filled floor on Montgomery. It’s all about filling in the empty spaces and helping the bank save $.
There are still separate WFC and WB branches about 100 yards apart on Chestnut St. Still lots of efficiencies to wring from the commercial real estate landscape in bankland, I’m afraid. Unless, of course, WFC owns the mortgages on said buildings. They’d probably hate to blow up their own debtors. Now that would be ironic!
There is a WFB branch in Stonestown, one in West Portal and a WB branch on Sloat very near Stonestown.
The guessing is one of the 3 branches will go. Stonestown and Sloat have good parking so some are thinking its West Portal that will close.
They have the only (open) parking lot on West Portal. I won’t go to Stonetown or Sloat for them I will just close my account, I’m sure lots of othe people would as well. Plus I don’t think the 3 sites are all that redundant.
Doubt west portal will be closed, as it is in close proximity to St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill, both areas with higher income clientele
Go Wells!!
Wells Fargo has had the spaces in 45 Fremont and 333 Market for many years. The linked article stated the move of the employees out of 155 5th was due to additional space by Wachovia. Clearly that isn’t the case since all three addresses mentioned are all Wells properties.
Wachovia doesn’t have much of a presence in SF outside of the retail stores anyway.
As is typical in mergers (bank and otherwise) I would guess that Wells is getting rid of employees with high salaries in SF and replacing them with lower paid workers in Charlotte (and elsewhere), just like the BofA merger with Nationsbank a few years ago. How many workers Wells will get rid of in San Francisco is anyone’s guess. the BofA merger really cut deeply and as far as I have been able to tell BofA refuses to release its statistics on the number of employees in the Bay Area. At least Wells is still releasing its numbers. For now.
Here’s the announcement of the WF lease renewal at 155 5th street 10 years ago:
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1999/08/16/story5.html