If recent office leasing activity is any indicator, the tech sector is alive and well in our region. During the first half of 2024, the Seattle/Bellevue market outperformed other well-known tech hubs – San Francisco, Los Angeles and Delhi – in the amount of office space acquired by IT companies. In those six months, tech firms signed leases and subleases absorbing over 1 million square feet of vacant space in our area.
Much of the large-scale leasing activity by tech companies favored Bellevue in the first two quarters (see list by square footage below). Among the companies moving into new space in Bellevue are Snowflake, which is subleasing from Facebook parent company Meta in the Block 6 building of Bellevue’s Spring District, and TikTok, the social media platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, which has a growing presence on the Eastside.
Seattle has some new tech tenants as well, but with smaller leases than those being signed across the lake in Bellevue. The largest new tenancy in Seattle last quarter was Remitly, which subleased 86,000 square feet from Amazon in the Rainier Square tower. Similarly, Databricks, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company, swooped in to take over square footage abandoned by Amazon in the West 8th building in Seattle’s Denny Triangle.
It’s expected that tech leasing/subleasing in Seattle could heat up further, as more companies implement return-to-office policies. Scroll down for the top 5 Seattle-area tech leases so far this year.
Top 5 Seattle-area tech leases between January and June 2024:
- Pokemon: 374,286 square feet in Bellevue
- Snowflake: 326,731 square feet in Bellevue
- ByteDance: 154,939 square feet in Bellevue
- ByteDance: 153,610 square feet in Bellevue
- Remitly: 86,519 square feet in Seattle
This post was based on information found on Seattle Times. Photo credit: Seattle Times
