UBS Said to Explore Leaving Its Stamford, Connecticut, Offices
Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) — UBS AG, the Swiss bank that has been cutting jobs, is studying whether to leave its Stamford, Connecticut, office complex, a person with knowledge of the plans said.
The bank is examining its options for the campus close to Stamford’s train station, where it has a lease that runs through 2017, said the person, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
At the same time, the landlord of the Zurich-based bank’s three buildings in Stamford has hired Cushman & Wakefield to explore leasing alternatives for the property, said Jay Hruska, a vice chairman in the brokerage’s Stamford office. The 725,000- square-foot (67,000-square-meter) complex, owned by AVG Stamford Members LLC, has a trading floor that is one of the largest in the world, about the size of two football fields.
UBS has been evaluating what to do with its Stamford offices for several years. In 2011, the bank considered moving its staff to 800,000 square feet at 3 World Trade Center, a skyscraper under construction in lower Manhattan. Instead it made a deal with Connecticut’s government to keep at least 2,000 jobs in the state, in return for a $20 million loan.
Megan Stinson, a UBS spokeswoman, said she couldn’t comment on the company’s plans for its Stamford offices.
The Stamford Advocate newspaper reported two days ago that Cushman & Wakefield was retained to market the main building, at 677 Washington Boulevard.
“We are examining alternative strategies in the event UBS were to move,” Hruska said in a telephone interview.
Scaling Back
UBS in 2012 said it planned to scale down by exiting most of debt-trading businesses to focus on money-managing. It is among several large investment banks that have reduced staff and office occupancy following the 2008 financial crisis.
Last year, the bank vacated most of 299 Park Ave., which had been known informally as the UBS Building, and moved employees into 1285 Avenue of the Americas. Capital One Financial Corp., the bank best known for its widely advertised credit cards, took most of the space that UBS left behind at the Park Avenue building.
The Fairfield County, Connecticut, office market, which includes Stamford and nearby Greenwich, has had vacancies of more than 20 percent since mid-2009, according to Cushman & Wakefield data. While demand for space has improved recently, “a handful of notable spaces are slated to come on line, keeping vacancy around its current level,” analysts for the brokerage wrote in a third-quarter report on the market.
–With assistance from Elena Logutenkova in Zurich.
To contact the reporter on this story: David M. Levitt in New York at dlevitt@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net Christine Maurus, Daniel Taub
