What downtown’s latest office exit means for the city’s urban core

Writer: Andrea Teran

October 2025 — In a move that underscores the shifting dynamics of urban office demand, telecommunications giant AT&T will vacate its downtown San Antonio office at 1010 N. St. Mary’s St., leaving approximately 400,000 square feet empty in an already challenged central business district.

The company is relocating to The Reserve at Westover Hills on the city’s West Side, where it will occupy more than 100,000 square feet. CBRE brokered the deal, according to sources cited by the San Antonio Business Journal.

The exit marks another significant setback for San Antonio’s urban core, which has seen a string of corporate departures in recent years. Other notable exits include Visionworks, PwC, and USAA, part of a broader trend of firms favoring suburban campuses over downtown high-rises.

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AT&T’s move aligns with similar patterns in other major Texas metros. In August, the Dallas Business Journal reported that AT&T was also exploring a suburban relocation from its global headquarters in downtown Dallas. Locally, the company’s relocation places it near other large tenants, such as consulting firm Guidehouse, which signed a 107,000-square-foot lease in the same Westover Hills complex last year.

Yet some local voices caution against viewing this trend as one-directional. Erin Cestero, president of JBGoodwin Realtors’ San Antonio Division, noted the evolving nature of workplace geography. 

“We still see COVID impacts, but where the outskirts boomed during COVID, now employees are returning to offices,” she said during a recent interview with Invest:. “Demand has moved back to areas with airport access, downtown living, and amenities… This is the adaptability I mentioned: We shifted to the outskirts during COVID, now we’re shifting back.”

In response to similar departures, IBC Bank announced plans to reposition its riverfront IBC Centre I property into a 300-room hotel, according to the San Antonio Business Journal.

“We’re seeing major projects like the $600 million Alamo redevelopment on the east side, a new baseball stadium on the West Side with 1,200 units of housing, and potentially even relocating the Spurs arena to the eastern edge of Hemisfair Park,” Centro San Antonio President and CEO Trish DeBerry told Invest:. “Great cities have great downtowns… Our job is to honor that history while embracing the future with things like autonomous vehicles, AI, and the next wave of urban innovation,” she added.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones has also emphasized the importance of a vibrant downtown. “We have a rare chance to revitalize our downtown. But it’s important to look at history, to see how similar projects played out before,” she said in a recent interview with Invest:. “We need to learn from that and apply those lessons now, so we can achieve our two big goals: reducing poverty and increasing competitiveness.”

Beyond office real estate, San Antonio is also experiencing evolving residential demand dynamics. Nearly half of online home listing views by San Antonio shoppers between April and June were for properties outside the metro, up from 36.8% in the same period in 2019, according to Axiom.

Top outbound destinations include Austin (11%), Corpus Christi (7.2%), and Dallas–Fort Worth (5.9%). Meanwhile, San Antonio remains a draw for buyers from DFW, Chicago, and Austin. Though not all online activity translates to home purchases, the data suggests mounting affordability pressures and a growing preference for suburban or regional alternatives.

“Depending on where people work, they generally try to live nearby,” said Gilbert Gonzalez, president and CEO of the San Antonio Board of REALTORS® in an interview with Invest:. “Some people want that quality of life; being able to walk to dinner, walk to the grocery store, and live in a more walkable city… But even in the suburbs, development is happening all over town: north, south, east, and west.”

Despite the headwinds downtown, select adaptive reuse efforts are gaining traction. Developers behind the Tower Life Residences project are converting the historic office tower into 242 apartments — half designated as affordable housing through a deal with Bexar County.

“We wanted the name to be enduring going forward,” said Jon Wiegand, managing director of real estate for McCombs Enterprises and part of the team behind Tower Life Residences, as cited by the San Antonio Business Journal. “We also want it to be emblematic of the use of the building going forward. So it is a tower, absolutely, but it does represent life and residential community. It sits in the center of our city. In a lot of ways this is the cultural hub of San Antonio. It sits on the banks of the San Antonio River, which is what brought life to our community and what continues to sustain us in so many different ways.”

Want more? Read the Invest: San Antonio report