Facebook leasing two office buildings totaling 384,000 sq. ft. and 4,100 sq. ft. of retail space in Seattle, nearly doubling its footprint in city
Social media giant Facebook is growing its presence in Seattle in a big way, leasing a pair of planned office buildings in the South Lake Union neighborhood, right in Amazon's backyard.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lease caps a steady climb: Facebook had grown from 90 to 400 Seattle employees in two years before it doubled its Seattle office space in early 2015, then showed off amenity-heavy plans like a rooftop park with walking trails and a fire pit for its new office. Now it is adding two planned South Lake Union buildings — 384,000 square feet plus street-level retail — right next to Amazon's headquarters campus.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains space for continued headcount growth in Seattle without leaving the South Lake Union corridor, while the developers of the two planned buildings lock in an anchor tenant before construction is complete.
- Amazon suddenly shares its home neighborhood with a second large-scale engineering operation competing for the same software talent pool.
Second-order effects
- A bigger Facebook payroll in South Lake Union tightens the local office market and bidding war for engineers, raising occupancy costs and hiring costs for Amazon and smaller startups nearby.
- The move pressures other Bay Area giants already renting whole towers elsewhere — as with Facebook leasing all 43 floors of San Francisco's Park Tower at Transbay — to treat Seattle as a standard expansion market rather than a satellite outpost.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the region splits into a two-hub structure: Facebook's later $367.6M purchase of a 400K-square-foot REI complex in Bellevue pushed its Seattle-area footprint past 3M square feet just as Amazon was reported scaling down its Seattle expansion and shifting toward Bellevue, moving the competitive frontier east across Lake Washington.
- Sustained big-tech absorption of speculative office stock makes Seattle landlords build to suit for single tenants, concentrating the market around a few anchor lessees.
The trend: Big tech is building deep second engineering hubs outside the Bay Area, with Seattle's South Lake Union and Bellevue emerging as the densest battleground between Facebook and Amazon.