Wells Fargo to sell San Francisco financial district headquarters, focus on East Coast: report

Wells Fargo will be putting its San Francisco headquarters on the market as soon as this month as it becomes the latest business to flee the City by The Bay.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the move to sell the 409,000 square foot office at 420 Montgomery St. in San Francisco’s Financial District is “part of a broader shift in the bank’s power base to the East Coast.”

Real-estate investment bank Eastdil Secured, which Wells Fargo sold in 2019 but still owns a minority stake in, is advising the bank on the sale.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo told The Journal that the bank continually assesses its real-estate portfolio “to ensure we are best meeting the needs of employees and customers, responding to consumer and economic trends, and managing our costs responsibly.”

Wells Fargo will consolidate its headquarters into its San Francisco office at 333 Market St. where the bank previously renewed its lease. Wells Fargo currently has approximately 23,000 employees in California, roughly 10 percent of the bank’s workforce.

The Montgomery St. location also housed the last of Wells Fargo’s corporate history museums, which will be decommissioned and closed.

The sale of the property will finalize a multi-year shift by Wells Fargo away from San Francisco. Most of the bank’s senior leadership is now based in New York or Charlotte, NC.

Over the past few years, San Francisco has seen a massive retail exodus. Stores including Nordstrom, Whole Foods, T-Mobile, Walgreens, Saks OFF 5th, and Old Navy have all fled the once-beloved city as crime has spiked.

One business owner, who had been robbed of tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise, said, "The politicians need to get a grip on this because it's worse than Afghanistan or Iraq."