Six months after Toronto-based Thomson Reuters announced plans to sell most of its sprawling campus in Eagan, the legal and financial services giant has announced plans to move into a new office that’s a fraction of its current footprint.

On Thursday, the company announced it will sublease more than 300,000 square feet at a property now referred to as “The Landing” in Eagan. The building is located at 2900 Ames Crossing Road, close to the TCO Performance Center at the Viking Lakes multi-use development. The new space, which shares the same address as Prime Therapeutics’ headquarters, is less than half the size of Thomson Reuters’ existing campus, which spans more than 1 million square feet in Eagan. In the fall, Axios reported that Prime Therapeutics was looking to sublease space at its 400,000 square feet campus at the same location.

Thomson Reuters employees prefer to split their time between working in the office and from home, Paul Fischer, co-site lead for the company’s Minneapolis-St. Paul campus, said in a news release announcing the move. Fischer, who also serves as president of the company’s legal professionals branch noted that employee feedback shaped the company’s search. The new office, which employees will move to in the first quarter of next year, features amenities including a fitness center, outdoor walking paths, a full-service cafeteria and premium coffee shop, and a deck overlooking Lake Shanahan.

“Our work environment is an extension of our supportive policies that empower colleagues to maintain a healthy work-life balance,” Fischer said in the release.

Thomson Reuters worked with global real estate firm Colliers to select and acquire the new office space. Colliers is also assisting with the sale of the majority of the current Eagan campus. In January, the company put 179 acres of its 263-acre Eagan campus up for sale. The company has been in its current campus since the 1996 acquisition of West Publishing Co., a provider of legal information and court records. At the time, Thomson Reuters paid $3.43 billion to buy West.

But after decades in the facility, the space was already facing a level of vacancy even before Covid, Thomson Reuters VP of real estate and facilities Tom Walrath told TCB in a recent interview. This vacancy issue obviously worsened by the pandemic. “When you have a big building, and there’s vacancy, people just aren’t interacting with each other. They’re not seeing each other,” he said.

After surveying employees and simply being in the office, Walrath said it was clear Thomson Reuters needed to downsize its space, but he noted it was still also clear the company’s next office environment had to be “commute-worthy.”

While classic amenities included in the new space are noteworthy, Thomson Reuters emphasized that the new office was chosen because it offers an “engaging experience for connecting and collaborating with colleagues while in the office.”

This echoes what Walrath told TCB a month ago: “I had a colleague recently say, ‘I can get coffee at home. I can make lunch at home. I have a nice office and desk setup at home. The amenity that I want to have at work is my coworkers.’ And I thought, wow… we realized that coming in is not only good for each of us, but it’s also good for our team. And the idea of your coworker as an amenity I thought was really quite interesting.”