Over the last several months, Wells Fargo Advisors has pumped millions of dollars into refreshing its office campus west of downtown St. Louis.
The investment has retrofitted offices, built out entire floors for new workspace and updated employee amenities. A new cafeteria opened last year and a new fitness center is being built that should open by the end of next month.
All that work and employee reshuffling will soon free up its two older buildings at the northwest corner of Jefferson Avenue and Market Street.
The company isn’t revealing too much yet on what’s going to happen in those offices — or the land underneath them — after employees move out. But those older buildings right at the corner should be empty by the end of the year.
“It’s not in our best interest to keep the buildings if they’re not going to be occupied,†said Zach Smith, a senior vice president and business and administration manager who has been a lead on the campus reconfiguration projects.
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Wells Fargo Advisors owns all the real estate on its midtown campus, and Smith said the company is still deciding on a plan for the buildings, but options include selling them or tearing them down.
He did, though, mention that the Wells Fargo Advisors’ St. Louis campus frequently hosts employee training conferences and the company could benefit from more full-service hotel space with large enough conference spaces to host employees that come to town for those events.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty keeping the company busy as it updates office space on the campus that is the home base for some 5,100 employees, most of them working for the Wells Fargo Advisors brokerage unit that was A.G. Edwards & Sons until 11 years ago.
The campus investment is part of a roughly $33 million plan announced back in 2012 that has added some 500 employees to offices just west of downtown. Though construction projects have been underway for years, work on the campus accelerated over the last two years, Smith said.
Part of the work is aimed at adding amenities to attract talented workers. The new fitness center is being moved from one of the older buildings to be closer to workers’ offices.
The new cafeteria is also closer to workers and offers a huge selection of choices. The company even partners with local restaurants such as Mission Taco Joint and Guerrilla Street Food, which come onto campus some days and use cafeteria space to sell food to workers.
“We really want to be able to compete for team members,†Wells Fargo Advisors spokeswoman Shea Leordeanu said.
It's among a dozen cities seen as attractive as the bank looks for affordable alternatives.
That’s because the company has identified St. Louis as a key campus for growth. As positions open up, Leordeanu said Wells Fargo touts St. Louis as an option for potential employees or draws on the region’s reservoir of financial services talent. The city’s lower cost of living and financial services workforce make it an attractive locale for the company.
“St. Louis is a core market,†Smith said. And the office campus has “a ton of space.â€
The added investment is a vote of confidence from the financial services giant in the St. Louis hub, which it took over in 2008 following its acquisition of Wachovia Corp., a year after that firm bought St. Louis’s A.G. Edwards.
The continued investment and organic employee growth count for something when you consider parent Wells Fargo has said it’s on track to cut $4 billion in expenses through next year and that it is considering combining its two retail brokerages. Bank officials have said those initiatives could actually bolster its St. Louis operations, though.
There’s “plenty of floors†in the remaining office buildings that have room to add employees by reconfiguring space, Smith said this week, so the office still has room to grow.
Even as this latest round of offices and the fitness center wraps up, work on the campus “will continue for the foreseeable future,†Smith said.