Outdoor retailer REI Co-op said Wednesday it plans to sell its newly finished corporate campus in Bellevue, Wash., another sign of how quickly the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the shift to remote work and prompting a major impact on commercial real estate.
The retailer, which announced it was building the outdoor-friendly campus in 2016 and began construction in 2018, said that its headquarters would ultimately be made up of multiple “satellite” locations across the Seattle area and that it would “lean into remote working as an engrained, supported and normalized model” that could also allow employees to work outside the region.
“The dramatic events of 2020 have challenged us to reexamine and rethink every aspect of our business and many of the assumptions of the past. That includes where and how we work,” REI President and CEO Eric Artz said in a video call with employees, according to a company statement.
Employees who would have worked at the campus, which media reports had called the “most outdoorsy HQ ever” and “like summer camp for grown-ups” for its rooftop terraces, courtyard full of native plants and large sliding doors to the outside, had not yet taken occupancy. Like many office-based employees, they began working from home in March and had been expected to move midsummer.
Some commercial real estate investors say other companies could follow suit as employers grow comfortable with employee productivity and the ability to collaborate while working from home, all while allowing major cost savings.
“The owners of big corporate buildings are really starting to see that their employees really don’t want to come to work in the office anymore,” said Rick Mirza, a commercial real estate investor and CEO of Daulat, a private-equity firm. “That feeling that we work somewhere, and it’s this whole big-tribe mentality — [some are] realizing that’s not that necessary."
Ben Steele, REI’s chief customer officer, said in an interview that the original idea for the new campus was to focus on collaboration, but “if I look at what we’ve seen and learned in the four years since, [it’s that] collaboration can happen in a lot of ways and doesn’t necessarily require a single location.”