Amazon will take another high rise tower in Bellevue, Wash., according to a real estate brokerage report, and because of the tech giant’s rapid growth, the downtown area is virtually out of available office space.
Brokerage Kidder Mathews reports that Amazon has leased a planned 17-story, 377,000-square-foot building called Summit III. With this new lease, Amazon will have more than 1 million square feet of offices in Bellevue.
Amazon has yet to publicly comment on the lease — and did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story — but it has been rumored for months. The project was first conceived prior to the recession but put on ice when the economy went south. The owner, Hines, has changed up the plans a bit, and recently got the OK from the city of Bellevue to go ahead with the project.
Another brokerage report, this one from Broderick Group, says that with the latest real estate activity “there is currently not a single vacant full floor available for lease on a direct basis,” in downtown Bellevue.
Over the last four years, Bellevue has experienced an incredible turnaround in its office market from a time when it appeared the sky was falling. Expedia announced plans to move to the Seattle waterfront in 2015, while at the same time, several new buildings were set to open with no major pre-leases announced.
Amazon stepped in to fill the void, opening its first office in Bellevue in the summer of 2017. A year later, Amazon leased the tower Expedia will vacate as part of the Seattle move.
Amazon said in August, at the time of the Expedia building lease, that it had 2,000 people in Bellevue with capacity for 2,500 more. Amazon has 135 open positionsbased in Bellevue on its online job board.
Amazon isn’t the only major mover and shaker in the Bellevue real estate market:
- Expedia is holding on to some space in Bellevue, even after its Seattle headquarters opens.
- Google is taking 80,000 square feet at a building in Bellevue called One Twelfth @ Twelfth, with plans to lease another 30,000 square feet.
- Facebook inked a pair of leases totaling 85,000 square feet in a pair of downtown Bellevue buildings.
- Though not technically in downtown, T-Mobile made a major long-term commitment to Bellevue, re-upping its lease out to 2030 and announcing plans to redesign its headquarters campus.
Developers are now lining up to build in Bellevue, but companies looking for space are going to have to wait awhile. In January alone, Kidder Mathews reports, a staggering five office projects in Bellevue totaling 1.15 million square feet are set to begin construction, with even more on the horizon. However, even with all this activity, Broderick Group reports that the next new downtown office buildings won’t open until 2022.
This could create opportunities for cities and projects outside the downtown Bellevue area. Just east of downtown Bellevue is the Spring District, a huge new community built around a future light rail station that has already snagged REI as a major tenant. Facebook has been linked to planned office space there, but nothing has been announced so far.
Outside of Bellevue, there are projects like Kirkland Urban, which has leased space to Tableau Software and Wave Broadband, though Google has been rumored as a buyer for the entire property. In Renton, there’s the massive Southport office project on the shores of Lake Washington that has yet to lure a tenant.
This post originally appeared on GeekWire.
