Chase Subleases 86,000 SF at West San Antonio Building

SAN ANTONIO-Chase BankCard Services Inc. has taken 86,000 sf in a sublease in San Antonio’s west submarket for a call center for credit card customers. Dallas-based WorkPlaceUSA represented Chase in the lease negotiations and will design and build out the space at 7050 Fairgrounds Parkway.

This is the second San Antonio contract between Chase and WorkPlaceUSA. The first was Chase’s 151,000-sf development in the Westover Hills Business Park.

Chase, a unit of JP Morgan/Chase Bank, is subleasing the office space from OnPoint LP. Jay Ballou, a WorkplaceUSA senior vice president, and Audrey Cauthen, a senior associate in its tenant brokerage group, acted on Chase’s behalf. John Taylor of Trammell Crow Co.’s San Antonio office represented OnPoint.

Chase will occupy the entire one-story building. Work has begun on the retrofit and the office accommodations should be ready in August. The retrofit will make the facility more efficient and create more usable space, Ballou tells GlobeSt.com. It could handle up to 600 workers. Ballou declined to say how long the sublease runs.

OnPoint used the facility as a call center for American Airlines. It closed the center in September 2001 when American made cut backs to cut costs.

“We’ve done several short-term leases for them in the past that ended up feeding into the phase one building at Westover Hills,” Ballou says. “We also did all of the site selection, design and construction to build that facility.”

In looking for Chase’s site, WorkPlaceUSA found few choices, Ballou says. “It was a project that had pretty specific need and it’s a sizable requirement in a market that didn’t have a lot of options,” he says. Prospective properties were eliminated because of a lack of parking, their location and infrastructure, he said.