Optum’s headquarters building in Eden Prairie Courtesy of UnitedHealth Group

Early next year, UnitedHealth Group will move out of its Minnetonka headquarters and into an Eden Prairie corporate campus that houses the company’s health services arm Optum.

The health care giant’s move out of its 20-acre campus on 9900 Bren Road building in Minnetonka and into the Optum campus at 11000 Optum Circle in Eden Prairie is not surprising. UnitedHealth already announced last year it would not renew its Minnetonka lease with LCN Capital Partners.

And rather than leasing, the Optum campus is owned a subsidiary of the health care giant known as “EP Campus I, LLC,” according to Hennepin County property records.

“UnitedHealth Group offers many ways for our teams to structure how and where work gets done. … The Optum Campus offers many amenities and plenty of space to meet our current needs, while providing room for future growth,” said spokewsoman Caroline Landree in a statement.

UnitedHealth has implemented a flexible work, Landree told TCB. Due to this flexible model, the company cannot say the exact number of employees moving to the other campus. Employees from the Minnetonka office, including C-suite executives, will begin their move to Eden Prairie in early 2024, adding UnitedHealth to a growing list of companies across the Twin Cities metro and the nation that have opted to downsize their suburban office footprint. In total, UnitedHealth Group employs 18,000 in Minnesota.

Across the Twin Cities, about a quarter of all office space was vacant at the beginning of this year.  In the next decade, average square footage per employee in the U.S. is expected to decline from 190 square feet to 165 square feet, leaving an excess of 330 million square feet of vacant space, according to a recent study by Cushman & Wakefield.

Minnetonka building owner LCN Capital Partners is working with Cushman & Wakefield to determine the future of the property UnitedHealth is moving out of. On the surface, the 20-acre corporate campus may seem to have what most companies are looking for: The 10-story, 343,602-square-foot office building includes a large cafeteria, a fitness center, large conference rooms, and a small Caribou Coffee on-site. But the Optum campus also offers many of the same amenities: a cafeteria, a gym, and many different work spaces.

Generally speaking, demand for the amount of office space offered at 9900 Bren Road campus just isn’t there right now, Cushman & Wakefield’s Dan Gleason told TCB earlier this year. The property is currently listed for sale or lease. According to tax records, the property was last valued at about $40 million.

The listing said the company plans to leave the property by Jan. 1, 2025, but can vacate sooner.