Dive Brief:
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Jacobs Engineering Group will move its headquarters from Pasadena, CA, to Dallas, according to the Dallas Business Journal.
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The international engineering firm, which employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, already occupies 100,000 square feet of office space in Dallas' central business district. The company said it would add to that space in order to accommodate additional employees.
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Jacobs said it will maintain a staff of 1,500 in Southern California and approximately 700 around the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. The company already has 4,500 employees throughout Texas.
Dive Insight:
Jacobs was ranked No. 235 on this year's Fortune 500 list, one of just seven construction-industry companies to earn a spot. Steven Demetriou, the company's president and CEO, told Fortune, which reported that its revenues and profits had fallen slightly since the previous year, that Jacobs had reorganized to focus on just a few lines of business, a cost-cutting move intended to bolster its bottom line. Jacobs also earned a place on Fortune's latest "World's Most Admired Companies" list.
Toyota announced a few years ago that it — and its 3,000 employees — would also leave Southern California for the Dallas area. While many assumed that the move was engineered to take advantage of the cheaper operating costs in Texas, late last year industry insider Albert Niemi, dean of the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, shed new light on the automaker's decision.
Niemi told the Los Angeles Business News in December 2015 that the tipping point in Toyota's decision to relocate was that employees complained they could not afford to buy homes near its current headquarters in Torrance, CA, which is in pricey Los Angeles County. At the time Toyota made its decision to move, houses in the Torrance area reportedly cost three times those in Dallas-Fort Worth. The company's new headquarters is currently under construction in the Dallas suburb of Plano, TX.
