Why LendingClub CEO Scott Sanborn is willing to bet big on downtown San Francisco

Business Journals

23-04-2025

A financial-technology company asked its workers to return to their San Francisco office in 2021. The CEO says it has been so successful that the company is buying a new FiDi headquarters and committing to the city.
Story Highlights LendingClub buys 88 Kearny St. for $74.5 million.
Workers returned to the office in 2021, earlier than many other tech companies.
CEO says after initial resistance, workers now consider in-office days their "favorite days of the week."
As LendingClub moved closer to buying a San Francisco office building for its headquarters, its board of directors wanted to confirm the company was committed to downtown San Francisco, where it has been based since 2012.
'We said, 'Yes, absolutely,'' CEO Scott Sanborn told the Business Times in an interview April 18.
LendingClub (NYSE: LC) had announced the prior day it entered into a definitive agreement to buy the 234,000-square-foot 88 Kearny St. site for $74.5 million, or $318 per square foot, confirming earlier Business Times reporting the fintech was narrowing in on the building.
'We have offices in Boston, New York and Salt Lake City,' Sanborn said. 'We've got great people everywhere. But this is definitely the headquarters, and will remain that.'
With its existing lease for its 115,000-square-foot headquarters at 595 Market St. expiring in the spring of 2026, LendingClub began considering the future of its footprint in downtown San Francisco. Given the state of the city's commercial real estate market — building valuations are at their lowest levels in decades — the firm knew it had to at least crunch the numbers on buying a building instead of leasing space, Sanborn said.
As it turned out, it found the cost of buying was less than leasing, and as a bank — a transition LendingClub made in 2021 — it could finance its own purchase without impact to its financial performance.
LendingClub also wanted to remain rooted in San Francisco, Sanborn said. It moved to the city from the Peninsula in search of a broader talent pool, seeking to hire not just engineers but also professionals in the financial and marketing sectors. It has stayed for that talent – but also because of the vibrancy San Francisco brings to company culture, per Sanborn. A typical company outing might involve taking all 380 San Francisco-based employees to a game at Oracle Park.
And these days it's hard to walk out of 595 Market in the evenings after in-office days and not run into a gaggle of staffers enjoying margaritas at Uno Dos Tacos, the Mexican restaurant on the building's ground floor, Sanborn said.
The company began calling employees back to in-person work in 2021, earlier than many of its peers in the tech sector.
'At first there was some resistance, and then pretty universally, people said: 'Those are my favorite days of the week,'' Sanborn said.
Today, employees are asked to work from the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to job postings on the company's LinkedIn page. But LendingClub's current space at 595 Market was not designed with a hybrid work model in mind; the plan at 88 Kearny is to make the building work for LendingClub's specific needs, including 'the ability to zoom from any room, and have the acoustics be right,' Sanborn said.
He also views 88 Kearny as something of a brand opportunity. The 21-story building sits at the highly trafficked corner of Post and Kearny streets; it boasts a corner retail space occupied by a Citibank branch that Sanborn says provides an opportunity for street-level visibility for LendingClub branding.
'Similar to what you see in what we have here in this building,' Sanborn said of 595 Market, where LendingClub signage is set prominently above a Chase bank branch. 'Except when you know it's yours, and you plan to be there forever… we plan to make it a real branding moment.'
LendingClub will occupy approximately 100,000 square feet in the building; the remaining 134,000 square feet is largely leased up to existing tenants, according to Sanborn, some of whom have renewed since LendingClub emerged as a buyer for the building. The fintech will make the move from 595 Market to its new headquarters at 88 Kearny in spring 2026.