By Katie Burke CoStar News
The Vanguard Group is cutting ties with one of its Philadelphia-area offices, the latest move by the global investment adviser to trim its corporate real estate portfolio.
The Malvern, Pennsylvania-based firm opted not to renew the lease on its nearly 88,000-square-foot space at 45 Liberty Blvd., one of several properties it occupies that comprise its headquarters. It is the latest in a string of cuts the company has made to consolidate its national office presence, echoing moves by other large tenants across the United States as they look to adjust to evolving post-pandemic needs.
“Vanguard continuously evaluates the effective use of workspace in our leased and owned properties,” a Vanguard representative said in a statement to CoStar News. “As part of this effort, we are exiting our leased space at 45 Liberty Blvd. to optimize our existing footprint.”
The firm's looming exit is expected to spike the 155,000-square-foot building's vacancy rate to about 65% after years of being fully occupied. Vanguard's current lease is set to expire later this month.
The investment adviser's Malvern headquarters has long been spread across several properties in the Philadelphia suburb. The bulk of Vanguard's 20,000-person global workforce is based in the region, and despite its planned Liberty Boulevard exit, it still occupies just shy of 1.4 million square feet of office space there.
Yet similar to a cohort of tenants elsewhere across the country, Vanguard's decision to cut ties with some of its Malvern space is ultimately a result of reevaluating spatial needs and eliminating anything that has since become extraneous.
Vanguard is also letting go of one of its leases in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it is one of the region's largest employers. The firm had fully occupied the 123,340-square-foot building at 8501 E. Raintree Drive for the past two decades. In a sign of the national office market's strengthening recovery, the space is already set to be backfilled by mobile network provider Consumer Cellular.
Back in Malvern, the owner of 45 Liberty Blvd., FLD Group, is in talks with a prospective tenant to fill about 65,000 square feet of Vanguard's looming vacancy, according to a CMBS loan report.
