The company is already headquartered in the Pacific North West US city and is now apparently aiming to add to its stock of several million square feet of office space and to its American workforce.
An uncertain economy has not prevented Amazon from continuing its business growth in recent years but it has left the offices at 1918 Eighth Avenue in Seattle lying largely unused. The suspicions of those close to the local office market are that the retail giant will soon be occupying at least 15 of the 36 floors at the site.
Having been completed in 2009, the building’s owners Schnitzer West has had trouble renting the resulting offices, with less than a sixth of the available space currently under lease. Some analysts are predicting that Amazon will take over even more than 15 floors of the building in the next few months.
Neither Amazon nor Schnitzer West has been keen to discuss the prospect of a large-scale leasehold deal but there has been plenty of speculation about what such a move might mean for Seattle’s office market.
Peter Truex from Collier’s International told the Seattle Times, “Amazon has become a key driver, and a market-maker, in the downtown office marketplace.”
“It would be an indicator to other tenants who may be sitting on the sideline that it’s time to get serious,” he added.
Seattle is in Washington State on America’s Pacific coast, meanwhile, the nation’s capital Washington DC was recently reported by NAI Global to have the strongest office space market in the US at the end of last year.
Editor’s notes: In March 2011, Amazon signed to lease 460,000 square feet of office space at 1918 Eighth Avenue equating to two-thirds of the building. The signing of the lease took the building to 94% occupancy and shortly after the deal, in May 2011, Schnitzer put the commercial property up for sale.
An affiliate of JPMorgan Chase then purchased it for $350 million.
As of May 2023, Amazon’s corporate headquarters and the Original South Lake Union Campus is listed as 410 Terry Avenue, North Seattle – the 1.7 million square foot campus has been owned by the company since 2007.
The corporation occupies several properties throughout Seattle.