Toyota Motor Corp. is looking to move its U.S. Sales headquarters from California to West Plano, located in suburban Dallas, Texas.
The auto manufacturer is negotiating to buy an office site in Legacy business park, where it would employ over 4,000 workers, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Real estate owners familiar with the plan said Toyota has spent months talking to real estate owners and developers in Plano.
California is home to the biggest U.S. auto market advocating strict clean-air rules, Bloomberg reported. Toyota's Prius Hybrid has been the Golden State's top-selling model for the past two years.
Toyota has over 5,300 California employees - most of them working at the company's office in Torrance, near Los Angeles. These employees are involved in sales, marketing, engineering, financing, and product planning. Details have yet to be revealed about which functions will move to the new office in Plano.
Texas Governor Rick Perry has made many visits to California to bring businesses to his state, promising lower taxes and easier regulations, Bloomberg reported. In his final year as governor, Perry aired radio commercials in California talking about the state's high taxes.
"A year ago, I was here, in California, encouraging companies to look to Texas for expansion and relocation," he said in an ad paid for by Americans for Economic Freedom. "Over the past year and a half, more than 50 California companies have announced plans to expand or relocate in Texas, creating more than 14,000 jobs."
The automotive manufacturer's U.S. headquarters has been in California since the late 1950s. The company, which sells over 2 million vehicles each year in the U.S., also has a manufacturing plant in San Antonio, the Dallas Morning News reported.
The campus Toyota has planned to build is slated to rival the size of State Farm Insurance's regional office, which is under construction in Richardson. This would reportedly be the biggest of this kind of out-of-state move to Legacy business park since the relocation of J.C. Penny in the 1980s from Manhattan to Plano.
