Wells Fargo and KDC officially began construction on a $455 million office campus in Irving on Tuesday.
The Dallas-based developer and the San-Francisco-based bank held a ground-breaking ceremony on April 18 at the place where the two-tower complex will stand by late 2025, the northeast corner of West Las Colinas Boulevard and Promenade Parkway.
The new office campus will add a total of 850,000 square feet of office space to Wells Fargo’s already well-established presence in Dallas-Fort Worth, as its CEO Charlie Scharf said, per the Dallas Business Journal.
With deposits of $28.17 billion as of 2022, Wells Fargo is the third-largest bank in North Texas.
It currently occupies over 800,000 square feet of office space in 14 corporate sites around the metroplex.
The new plot spans 22 acres, leading Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to praise the project as a “Texas-sized investment in the future of Las Colinas and Irving,” per the DBJ.
While Scharf confirmed that the bank’s headquarters will remain in San Francisco, he explained that with a significant employee base that has grown from 5,800 employees to 6,800 in DFW, investment in the area made sense, per the DBJ.
Upon completion, the new campus will serve as the base for 3,000 employees.
“[We’re] very, very thoughtful about where we want to add our resources. We’re thrilled to be able to not just consolidate but to continue to add resources here in the DFW area. We’re thrilled to be able to join other financial services companies, and one of the great attractions to the community here is the talent base,” Scharf said, per the DBJ.
This strategy of consolidating workspaces is being deployed elsewhere, such as in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The Wells Fargo employees of the Twin Cities will work from one of three locations by mid-2024, per Kare 11. Two other offices — one leased and the other now for sale — will be dropped.
As CEO of KDC Steve Van Amburgh explained, the new office campus in Irving was designed to be “timeless, sustainable, and organic,” per the DBJ.
It will be Wells Fargo’s first “net-positive energy” campus, expected to generate more power than it consumes, with electric vehicle charging stations, rooftop solar panels, and native plantings to minimize watering requirements.
In addition to its sustainability features, the new Wells Fargo office campus will offer a range of amenities for employees, per the DBJ.
These include a world-class food hall, a barista-style coffee shop, a dining hall with views overlooking Lake Carolyn, and a library with high-tech workshop space.
Abbott congratulated the city authorities of Irving on the project.
“You all are an economic powerhouse for the state of Texas,” he said, per the DBJ. “You’re [a] magnet for economic development projects. What you do has the secret sauce to success of what we’re able to achieve in the state.”
Compared to Dallas’ downtown, where a backlogged City-run permitting process slows the construction of new developments, the greater metropolitan area has a number of exciting projects in the pipeline.
For instance, as The Dallas Express recently reported, a new mixed-use development is being built in Frisco’s 2,500-acre Fields community that could give Legacy West in Plano a run for its money.
