Largest tenant at downtown Wichita’s Union Station trying to sublease its space

Faneuil, a Virginia-based business services outsourcing firm, left Union Station in downtown Wichita during the pandemic and now is trying to sublease its 65,000 square feet there.

When the call center was announced in 2017 as the central piece to Occidental Management’s renovation of the former train station, Faneuil said it could bring as many as 500 jobs. Later, that number jumped to almost 800, though it’s not clear how many people the company still employs remotely here.

No one with Faneuil returned multiple requests for comment, but Occidental president Chad Stafford confirmed that during the pandemic, the company “had to embrace the remote model.”

Now, potential new users could take between 15,000 and 65,000 square feet of the former terminal at 701 E. Douglas.

During Occidental’s renovation of the almost 200,000-square-foot complex, the company made a deal with the call center instead of creating a mixed-used space with shops, restaurants and other businesses as some had hoped for.

“We thought a larger user would allow us to do more with . . . the terminal building,” Occidental chairman and CEO Gary Oborny said at the time.

He explained that he probably could not have renovated the 1914 building as extensively without the big lease.

When it was originally built, Union Station was known as “the daylight station of America,” as one visiting Mississippi reporter put it before the opening, with an east bank of windows that flooded the area with light.

However, during reconfiguration of the building through the years, a lot of those windows were blocked with a mezzanine level and lots of smaller offices.

Oborny removed the mezzanine, but he said it was a decision he came to only after a lot of debate.

“OK, do we keep the square footage — as a real estate developer, you know, from a rent standpoint and a revenue standpoint — or do we take this building back to what it was before?”

Restoration was the right decision, Oborny said during the renovation, although “it always grabs you a little bit in the wallet.”

At the time, Oborny said having multiple uses in the building would have presented issues as well.

“That’s always the tricky thing with this stuff,” he said. “How do you control security? How do you give access to it? . . . How would you make this mixed-use? . . . It’s probably possible, but it was going to be challenging.”

Stafford said Faneuil’s departure doesn’t represent a new opportunity for Occidental to do something different at Union Station.

He wouldn’t say how much of Faneuil’s lease remains, but Stafford said it is still the call center’s space. That means the company has the option to return to it, as Stafford said he’s seen other companies do throughout the pandemic as they switch to remote working and then back again.

The sublease situation isn’t a bad thing, Stafford said.

“There were no incentives involved, so it’s not like the public’s losing out on anything.”

He said there’s now an opportunity for other companies to use the space, though.

“If someone needed some cool office space at Union Station, there’s some that the tenant would give up for them.”