Every published analysis of Well Fargo’s Christmas-week decision to sell its longtime headquarters high-rise deep in San Francisco’s financial district has missed the entire point.

Speculation has been rife that the huge California-centered bank plans to move its corporate headquarters out of San Francisco, where it been since Gold Rush days and the Pony Express era. Guesses for a new headquarters have included Minneapolis, Dallas, Charlotte and New York City, where Wells Fargo’s president now keeps his main office.

That came about because Charles Scharf joined Wells Fargo from Bank of New York Mellon and didn’t want to move. At the time, Wells Fargo had just completed a new “branch hub” complex along the Hudson River and Scharf moved into it.

So talk of Wells Fargo shifting its headquarters is old stuff, since the company already has a very diffuse headquarters structure, with yet another major complex in Minnesota.

The “experts” bemoaned Wells Fargo’s shift in San Francisco and the upcoming sale of its 420 Montgomery Street building as a sign that California will soon be a has-been as a financial center. That’s hokum.

So long as this state retains anything near its current stature as the world’s fifth largest economy, it will need to have a significant banking structure even if bank leaders keep offices in other cities, too. Big banks like Wells and Bank of America, another California native whose nominal headquarters are now out of state (in Charlotte), will need big employee bases here.

But like other white collar industries including insurance companies, law firms and stock brokerages, they saw many of their workers — even at executive levels — switch to working at home during the Covid 19 pandemic. So the businesses no longer need as many employees in their offices as often as before. It translates to billions of square feet of vacant offices, even if Tesla, Space X and Twitter/X owner Elon Musk disapproves and wants to call his own workers back to their old cubicles.

That’s not happening even at his companies, which have seen large-scale employee departures since Musk began making those demands. Example: Tesla last year saw a 44 percent departure rate among its executives, about five times the normal turnover rate for large corporations.

The Wells Fargo move has to be seen in its overall context, not merely as a banking move. (In fact, Wells officials said of San Francisco that “The city remains vital to us. It is very important to the bank.)

What’s happening is the same kind of real estate turnover that’s affected other office-centric businesses. Wells Fargo in 2023 sold one of its major San Francisco buildings, at 550 California Street, for $45 million, taking a loss of more than $200 million from what it paid for that structure in 2019, just before the pandemic.

Wells Fargo’s experience is similar to what’s happened to other office tower owners, with real estate investment trusts having lost billions of dollars when hundreds of tenant businesses left their old leases in the pandemic’s dust, exiting as fast as they could.

Now Wells is doing the same. Its workers will still come to an office sometimes. One common practice is to hold meetings and make plans at company headquarters, with workers carrying out those decisions largely from home offices.

Recognizing this reality, state legislators last spring passed a new law making building conversions into apartments and condominiums far easier than before, almost automatic.

This is the best way yet devised to solve much of California’s housing shortage, with new living units created in existing structures without altering the physical character of cities or neighborhoods.

So the Wells Fargo building sale and move actually is part of a trend, just not the trend many financial and real estate analysts think they’ve spotted of yet another big corporation moving headquarters out of California.

Sure, Wells Fargo will have significant offices elsewhere; it has had many of them for a long time. But the trend that’s really at work in this move is the switch from office-centric work environments to home offices, which has been underway now for almost five years.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.