JCPenney returns to Plano HQ next spring

It’s been more than two years, but JCPenney is pushing forward with plans for its Plano headquarters space.

Back in May, the department store announced to employees that it was moving its offices back to the Plano campus it built originally in 1992. The renovated offices will span more than 220,000 square feet, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The former Penney’s campus is now part of the 1.8 million-square-foot Legacy business park campus. It’s been repurposed as a multi-tenant building called CalWest. Tech firm NTT data currently occupies a large section of the campus.

The retailer moved its employees out of the longtime HQ to work from home or in vacant stores in Lewisville and Frisco, during the early days of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, ownership of the $1 billion campus was seized from Silos Harvesting Partners by a unit of Beal Bank. The bank had loaned Silos $389 million in 2016 to buy and redevelop the property. The lender paid $265 million in a nonjudicial foreclosure sale of the property at the very beginning of 2021, Collin County records show.

After being marketed by Cushman & Wakefield for 11 months, Austin-based Capital Commercial Investments bought the campus in November 2021, in one of the year’s biggest commercial property sales. At the time of the sale, Capital Commercial CEO Doug Agarwal was highly optimistic about the market demand for commercial real estate, even promising that JCPenney would be returning.

“There are so many tenants swimming in the marketplace,” Agarwal said. “We are going to see a lot of deals get made in the first quarter.”

Approximately 2,000 JCPenney employees will be called back to the Plano building, but not before CalWest does $10 million in renovations, expected to be completed by next spring.

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