Bridge Bank HQ extension marks largest lease transaction for DTSJ since start of pandemic

Bridge Bank has extended the lease on its Downtown San Jose headquarters by seven years, an apparent bet on a return to office life and vote of confidence in the city’s core office market despite its stubbornly high vacancy rate.

Bridge signed an early extension on its lease agreement for its 52,000-square-foot main office at 55 Almaden Boulevard, landlord KBS said last week in a public disclosure.

Neither Bridge Bank nor KBS responded to requests for comment.

Bridge, a subsidiary of Western Alliance Bancorporation, is one of the key tenants at The Almaden, a 416,000-square-foot Class B office park at 1, 55 and 99 Almaden Boulevard. The others are Zoom Video Communications, which is headquartered there, and cloud company Samsara. The complex is 95 percent occupied, with Bridge leasing one-eighth of its rentable square footage, KBS data show.

A Cushman & Wakefield team led by broker Brittain Cheney represented KBS in Bridge Bank’s San Jose lease extension.

The deal is downtown San Jose’s largest office lease transaction since the pandemic began, the second-largest being the Judicial Court of California renewing for almost 44,000 square feet in May 2021, according to Colliers data. It underlines how the U.S. banking industry continues to be among the country’s most concerned sectors in terms of the future of office work. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have aggressively pushed for employees to return to offices five days a week.

Although the likes of Goldman and JPMorgan have previously called remote work a poor fit for their business model, their attempts to bring workers back to the office have had mixed success. Only half of Goldman’s workers returned to its New York headquarters after it reopened in February. JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon said in his annual shareholder letter last month that working from home “will become more permanent in American business.”

While it’s unclear whether Bridge is taking the same approach, the extension of its headquarters lease indicates it sees value in physical workspace and retains confidence in Downtown San Jose. Roughly 20% of office space vacant in the area at the end of last quarter, up from 18.3 percent during the same period a year earlier, according to Newmark data.

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