Capital One Financial Corp. plans to reduce the size of its Long Island office by more than 80 percent due to the growing popularity of telecommuting, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

The bank has decided to abandon the 200,000-square-foot property at 1307 Walt Whitman Road in Melville, said Matthew L. Blauvelt, senior director of real estate transactions.

“We are relocating approximately 300 Capital One employees from our current location,” he wrote in a July 19 letter to the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency, obtained by Newsday under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

In a separate letter, also obtained through the FOIL process, Daniel J. Baker, attorney for Publishers Clearing House, stated that a sublease agreement was being negotiated with Capital One under which the bank would lease 3,250 square feet of space in the 300 Jericho Quadrangle building in Jericho.

This building houses the headquarters of Publishers, which no longer needs as much space after announcing it would lay off nearly half of the site’s 393 employees.

The IDA approved the sublease last month. The agency’s OK was necessary because Publishers receives tax breaks for its Jericho headquarters.

Capital One, based in McLean, Virginia, is the latest major employer in the Route 110 corridor in Melville to cut office space due to telecommuting.

In 2022, Henry Schein, Long Island’s largest publicly traded company by revenue, announced plans to move out of one of the two buildings at the corner of Baylis and Duryea Roads that served as its headquarters.

Nearby, MSC Industrial Direct Co. replaced its 160,000-square-foot headquarters and warehouse on Maxess Road with 25,000-square-foot offices at 515 Broad Hollow Road in 2020—an 85% reduction in space.

Long Island had 24.7 million square feet of prime office space as of June 30, with 18.4 percent of that space available for lease. The average rent was $32.34 per square foot, according to a research report by real estate firm Colliers.

Blauvelt, Capital One’s chief executive, said the company no longer needs the multi-story office building across from the Melville Marriott Hotel.

“Capital One originally purchased the Melville building (in 2016 from credit card processor First Data Corp.) to expand our presence in New York. COVID changed our growth plans at that location, and this resulted in us deciding to close the Melville building because it was too large for our workforce,” he said.

“We have decided to explore the possibilities of relocating this workforce to new locations and/or to existing Capital One locations across the country. If this were a purely financial decision, we could easily move these jobs to current Capital One locations, where we have ample additional space across the country, at no additional cost, and/or hire employees at remote locations across the country,” Blauvelt said.

But bank spokeswoman Kate Burgess said last week: “We have made the decision to relocate the Melville-based hybrid employees to a new office in the area.”

Capital One had about 430 employees at its Melville branch two years ago, the bank said at the time. Last week, Burgess did not answer Newsday’s question about why the workforce had shrunk to the current 300 people.

The Melville office staff is active in the areas of auto finance, commercial banking and risk management.

James T. Madore writes about Long Island business news, including economics, development and government-business relations. He was previously the Albany bureau chief.