JP Morgan notified WaMu employees on Thursday that it would close the 1,200-person, 217,000-square-foot Washington Mutual operations (call) center in Pleasanton by early spring of 2009 and that it will eliminate 400 jobs in its San Francisco operations center at 201 Mission St. in advance of a full shutdown of the center in late 2009 or early 2010, according to multiple local reports on Friday. A WaMu spokesperson did not immediately return a GlobeSt.com phone call seeking independent confirmation.

The Seattle Times this week reported that as many as 3,000 of WaMu's 4,200 workers in Seattle could lose their jobs , citing current and recently departed WaMu executives who spoke on condition of anonymity. WaMu owns a brand new 900,000-square-foot office tower in Downtown Seattle and leases an additional 700,000 square feet in nearby buildings. For more detail on WaMu's real estate portfolio in Seattle and the Bay Area, see GlobeSt.com's Oct. 1 article titled WaMu Sale To Impact West Coast CRE.

JPMorgan has until Christmas Eve to decide which WaMu leases it wants to keep, according to its agreement with the FDIC, which arranged its sale to Chase. Under that arrangement, Chase can abandon any space it does not want without penalty and the landlords would become creditors in WaMu's receivership, which is the FDIC's version of bankruptcy. If anything, compensation is likely to be pennies on the dollar; while WaMu's assets total $1.9 billion while its creditors--landlords, debt holders and shareholders--are expected to total more than $13 billion.