WILMINGTON — Bank of America, one of the top banking companies that held a strong foothold in Delaware’s largest city, will be moving out of the final building it still holds in the Bracebridge complex.
Bank of America will be relocating 500 employees from Wilmington to its Deerfield Campus in Pike Creek or to its Christiana Campus in Stanton by November 2025. No jobs will be eliminated in this transition, Bank of America representatives told the Delaware Business Times.
The vast majority of these jobs are in Bank of America’s consumer department, and some are in corporate audit functions as well as human resources and legal departments.
Once Bank of America exits Bracebridge II, an 11-story building at 1100 N. French Street, it will mark its total exit from the sprawling campus that the company acquired when it also bought out MBNA for $36 billion in 2005.
“This is a matter of having a massive real estate portfolio and this is parts of our efforts to manage that portfolio as efficiently as possible. We saw an opportunity with our newer facilities to be updated and possibilities to shorten commutes for some of our staff,” Bank of America spokesman Andy Aldridge told the Delaware Business Times.
The Bracebridge Complex was built with more than 1 million square feet of office space in a limestone and concrete structure that formed a multi-block campus. In total, it includes four office high-rises as well as two low-rises that served as a daycare and academy. It was designed to accommodate a share of the roughly 10,000 employees it had in the state.
Years later, Bank of America started to shed its office space in the complex, starting with one building and a parking lot that made up a block between Ninth and 10th streets. Those assets were sold to the state in 2007 for $13 million.
The 282,000-square-foot Bracebridge IV building was later donated to the Longwood Foundation in 2012. Finally, by 2018, Bracebridge I on N. King Street and Bracebridge III on N. French St. was sold to Capital Commercial Investments. Those two buildings represent 517,307 square feet in space combined.
Aldridge said that Bank of America is exploring options on the table for the final building in the sprawling complex.
“We will work to ensure that Wilmington has the same vibrance as it has,” he said. “That’s the main goal and it’s why we’re exploring options to find an organization that can use the building and continue to contribute to the downtown.”
Delaware is not the only place where Bank of America has handed off its commercial real estate. In an interview with CNBC in January, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that the office had let go of 40 million square feet of space in the past 15 years. However, the company still has 60 million square feet of office space.
Today, Bank of America has 6,000 employees in the First State.
