One of the nation's largest financial holding companies is getting ready to move employees into its new Dallas-area tech and innovation hub at The Star in Frisco, taking roughly 25% to 33% less space than Comerica's traditional offices and helping set the tone for how the bank will use real estate.
Comerica, a Dallas-based bank with nearly $86 billion in assets at the end of September, opened its 100,000-square-foot office spanning the top three floors of a nearly 300,000-square-foot office tower at 17 Cowboys Way in Frisco, Texas, a fast-growing city about 20 miles north of downtown Dallas. The office building is located at The Star in Frisco, a 91-acre mixed-use development surrounding the global headquarters and practice facility for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys.
Comerica's space in Frisco will become the home of the bank's new business and innovation center, housing numerous employees, including risk and compliance personnel, marketing and human resources workers, finance executives and a small number of wealth management and commercial banking professionals. The hub is the latest real estate evolution of Comerica's workplace design, Amy Pillivant, Comerica's director of corporate real estate and senior vice president, said in an interview with CoStar News.
"Our space is getting smaller, but it's getting better," Pillivant told CoStar News. "We want to invest in our colleagues and make this high-energy location a destination of choice. We want to make sure we can attract and retain the best employees and when they do come into the office, they are excited to come into the facility."
Comerica expects 300 of its employees to move into the new Frisco office by the end of the month, with room to add another 50 employees to the hub over time, Pillivant said. The bank isn't quite calling the office a second headquarters outside of its downtown Dallas office, she said, but it will act in a similar capacity — expanding its office space and offering an alternative workplace for employees typically working in downtown Dallas. The hub will have a place for employees throughout the region to swing by, with flexible, open seating and easy access to Wi-Fi available throughout the office.
Comerica also will have a small retail center on the first floor of the building, which is expected to open in February. The bank doesn't plan to give up any of its headquarters office space in downtown Dallas with the opening of this innovation hub. This new Frisco office will serve as a complement to its headquarters, with this latest office design helping guide the bank's future real estate projects.
The build-out of the top three office floors was expected to total $9.9 million, according to a state work permit. The retail center is expected to total nearly $574,000. Both projects are being designed by Nelson Architecture, according to a Comerica spokesperson.
Banking Iterations
The new innovation hub offers a glimpse of what's to come for Comerica, which has been designing what it calls alternative workplace strategies, or variations of the company's traditional office space, over the past eight years, Pillivant said.
Comerica's pilot of revamped office space began in Phoenix in 2015, referred to as design iteration 1.0. Since then, the bank has either rebuilt or remodeled 33 of its offices and continues to access its portfolio for new opportunities to upgrade its real estate, officials said. A 2.0 design iteration was unveiled in the wake of the pandemic, Pillivant said, with enhanced safety protocols for employees.
Now, eight years after that initial redesign, the Frisco hub represents Comerica's 3.0 design iteration, offering a smaller, nimbler footprint.
Comerica isn't the only financial institution revving up its office footprint in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Often, these new offices are smaller and designed to be more efficient. In recent years, JPMorgan Chase decided to shrink its office footprint in downtown Dallas by about 30% and Bank of America decided to lease about half of the space it has currently leased in the city's central business district.
Comerica is also upgrading its office space elsewhere to lure talented professionals to its doors. In Boston, the bank recently decided to move its office from one side of the city to the other to offer better walkable amenities for its employees.
"We look at our real estate on a regular basis," Pillivant told CoStar News. "In Boston, we decided to move to an office with better amenities and reduce our square footage in the process. We now have a beautiful office in a better location that can attract and retain employees."
Comerica expects to unleash its design for the new Frisco innovation hub throughout its office portfolio in the future. Another office hub already is under construction in Michigan, Pillivant said.
The Frisco office will offer concierge-level services to the bank's employees, welcoming them to work, helping book training or multipurpose rooms for the day and even making sure they are fed. The hub is designed with the bank's first agile rooms on every floor of the office for its tech team to innovate and bring new tech to market in a quicker way, Pillivant added.
The office is designed with neighborhoods for offices, workstations, focus rooms and huddle rooms for each business unit. Employees at the new hub can use curved monitors and softphones, which are designed to take calls through an Internet connection rather than a hardwired phone.
"We've reduced our square footage and taken that cost savings to put into the facility itself for our employees and customers with sit-stand desks, wellness rooms, curved monitors and the ability to move from one space to another seamlessly," Pillivant said, adding the bank plans to study how the Frisco innovation hub is being used to design future offices.
"We'll take the next six months to learn how this space is being utilized and how often it's being utilized. We will learn from it and there might be a 4.0 design in the future," Pillivant said.