State Farm to close Greeley offices, transition fully to WFH

GREELEY — State Farm Insurance Co. is poised to become one of the first major Northern Colorado employers to abandon its physical office spaces and adopt a fully work-from-home employment model as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Bloomington, Illinois-based insurer plans to vacate a dozen offices across the country, including its Greeley Operations Center, State Farm spokeswoman Gina Morss-Fischer told BizWest.

“Most employees assigned to these locations have been working from home since March and will continue to do so,” she said in an email. “As a company, maintaining flexibility in how and where we work is just one of the many ways we can better serve customers.”

State Farm is finalizing the timeline for when the Greeley office will be fully vacated. 

As recently as 2018, State Farm leased three buildings in the campus at 1555 Promontory Circle that housed about 1,100 workers. One of those was vacated in 2018 and remains available for lease by commercial real estate brokerage CBRE.

State Farm used to own the three buildings on Promontory Circle. In 2013, the company sold them for $52.7 million, part of a larger sale of 23 buildings at 18 locations nationwide. State Farm built the buildings to form its Greeley Operations Center in the early 2000s and had a 15-year lease, with five-year options.

The campus was quickly sold again, in 2014, to an affiliate of Phoenix-based JDM Partners LLC, former owner of the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks, for $60.8 million.

Mark Bradley, managing broker of Realtec Commercial Real Estate Services Inc. in Greeley, said State Farm’s eventual closure of the Greeley operations center was not unexpected.

“I expected that over the next decade that State Farm’s presence in Greeley was going to be greatly diminished,” he said. “My understanding was that offices they wanted to have open were going to be kind of more of the major metropolitan areas, like Dallas, where they have call centers.”

Bradley said that just as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated changes in the commercial real estate landscape, such as with retail closures as shoppers shifted online.

“What COVID’s done is accelerated what was going to happen over the next 10 years anyway, in retail,” he said. “The same thing has happened in office,” with employees working from home out of necessity because of the pandemic.

“Maybe it’s just happening sooner than it would have anyway because we’ve all gotten smart on how to work virtually …”

Bradley said closure of the operations center could actually be a good thing for Greeley, which has lacked large chunks of Class A space that could be used to attract a new and major corporate presence.

“In the long term, maybe it’s a good thing,” he said. “Greeley has not had a lot of large-footprint, quality office space available to attract more companies to come into the market. With a lot of companies vacating inner cities and wanting to come to places where there’s a high quality of life, then maybe this is an opportunity for Greeley to snag one of those companies by having a big footprint and somebody could come in and quickly occupy it for not as much money as if they were trying to build new.

“It’s kind of an economic-development guy’s dream, right, to have a big facility like that that they can use to market their city,” he added.

The terms of State Farm’s lease in Greeley are unknown. but Morss-Fischer said the firm does not intend to renew any of the leases at the offices it plans to abandon. 

If needed, State Farm “will continue to sublease space if possible,” she said.

In addition to the Greeley offices, State Farm is closing up shop in the following locations:

• Austin
• Murfreesboro, Tennessee
• Ballston Spa, New York
• Birmingham, Alabama
• Charlottesville, Virginia
• Concordville, Pennsylvania
• DuPont, Washington
• Lincoln, Nebraska
• New Albany, Ohio
• Newark, Ohio
• Winter Haven, Florida

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