On Seattle’s local sketch comedy show, a likeness of real estate legend Martin Selig was talking in used-car-salesmen lingo.
“I’ve got buildings, buildings, buildings,” the comedian playing Selig shouted. “And I’m letting them go for outrageous prices! Go ahead, make me an offer! I’ve got to be crazy to let buildings go at these prices. Yeah, I am crazy! And I’m up to my ears in debt! My loss is your gain, so come see me.”
Not long before the spoof, Selig claimed to have control of one-third of the city’s downtown office space. But now he was facing a cash crunch. Overleveraged, he’d been forced to sell the city’s tallest tower, the Columbia Center, whose topping out had crowned him king of Emerald City.
The events, which took place in 1989, turned out not to be the end for Selig. He’d have to hand some of his 6.5 million square feet of office properties back to lenders and Seek Chapter 11 on two buildings, but the city’s biggest-name developer came back from the brink and rode the tech boom into the 21st century. By 2024, he owned about 31 buildings downtown, a total of 4.9 million square feet.
But the episode turned out to be prescient. Now 88, he’s “up to his ears in debt” again, with about $850 million in loans he can’t cover. He lost control of three big projects that entered the market just as the post-Covid office exodus peaked. In July, he listed his Sun Valley ski chalet for $13.5 million; the price has since been cut by $1 million. He laid off 86 people from Martin Selig Real Estate, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, and his apparent successor, daughter Jordan Selig, resigned to work on other projects, the Seattle Times reported. All told, roughly two-thirds of his downtown buildings have gone back to lenders or are under outside management.
Covid closures, remote-work trends and high interest rates affected commercial property owners nationwide. But the exact moment that the pandemic closures devastated Seattle could help explain why Selig was hit so hard.
(Selig and his office declined to comment for this article.)
With a once-in-a-generation tech boom peaking in 2019, John Miller, CBRE’s Executive Managing Director for the Pacific Northwest, explained, buildings were selling for nearly $1,000 a square foot and loans got done on the basis of sky-high valuations. Selig, so famous for operating on the razor’s edge of financial ruin that he was known as the Houdini of Seattle real estate, was mortgaged to the hilt at buildings priced during prosperity. When no tenants leased and prices crashed, the expensive offices were nothing but deadweight.
Even now, as downtown bottoms out and recovery takes shape, Seattle is finding itself outcompeted by suburban submarkets like Bellevue, which has attracted the tech sector, blocking operators stung by the downturn from catching the next wave.
“The sadness with Martin is that he’s not some institutional JP Morgan or Blackstone,” Charlie Farra, of Newmark’s Seattle office, said. “He is an individual who is literally looking at an empire that he created from the ’60s until today, and his life’s work is being handed over to others.”
Harleys and helicopters
Early on, Selig developed a hunger to succeed, he has said. His family, German Jews who’d escaped from Nazi Germany, had a store at 23rd and Jackson that specialized in childrenswear during the postwar Baby Boom. Martin worked there from his elementary-school days, learning schmoozing and sales and earning a quarter per hour. Over the years, he saved $2,000. With another $2,000 lent from his parents, he bought a warehouse next to the Burgermaster drive-in near University Village in 1958, during his senior year at the University of Washington. He’d show it off to frat brothers. His tenant, a shipping-and-receiving facility for Univar, never missed a rent payment. Selig liked the cash flow.
He sold the warehouse six months later and paid his parents back. He soon bought more real estate: a shopping center, then a string of retail properties in Everett, Renton, Bellevue, Monroe and North Seattle.
No new office buildings had been developed downtown between 1930 and 1960. But the market emerged from its slump about the time Selig was finding his footing.
In 1969, Selig developed his first building, a five-story, 60,000-square-foot office building in Lower Queen Anne, leased to Sperry Rand. After that, he built one a year for two decades. His spree included the Twin Toasters, office buildings on 4th Street that came online in 1979 and 1980. He led a mini boom at the Denny Regrade, where the city’s chief engineer had flattened a hill decades earlier.
“I’ve got buildings, buildings, buildings. And I’m letting them go for outrageous prices!”
His masterpiece was the Columbia Center, which opened in March 1985. Still the city’s tallest building, it was pure Selig. The form, three inwardly curving arcs placed back-to-back-to-back was, in part, a move to offer better views and higher rents. That made the building look “as if Darth Vader is flipping Puget Sound country the bird,” one critic wrote. To add additional floors, he used public areas, shaded plazas and three floors of retail spaces to max out on density bonuses.
“Here’s a guy who pushed the city to the limit and the city gave him a bonus for it,” Paul Schell, Seattle’s former mayor, said.
What he meant was — you had to have an appetite for risk to try something like this. Selig did. Many of his buildings were on spec. He signed huge loans against existing properties to build new ones. For the Columbia Center, he took out what was then the biggest private loan in Washington state history at $205 million, putting many of his existing properties up as collateral, even though he didn’t have an anchor tenant.
“Everybody said to him, ‘Marty, with as much money as you owe, how do you sleep at night?’” Fred Weiss, of Coldwell Banker, said in 1986. His response: “I sleep a lot better than my banker does.” (He quickly filled up the Columbia Center with tenants.)
Selig would reinvest his profits in the next big building, delaying payment to lenders and contractors as long as he could. He’d often end up in court, but the bills always got paid.
Out of the office, he liked to helicopter ski in the back country. He rode his Harley around the world with a group of older businessmen called Hell’s Rotarians. He took sometimes unpopular local political positions, opposing a monorail, backing candidates in local races and causes like repealing the estate tax, and initially agreeing to co-host a 2016 Trump fundraiser in deep blue Seattle before pulling out.
Once one of his buildings was going, it was less about risk-taking and more about putting in the work.
Profiles from the ’80s paint Selig as a focused operator prowling the city in search of tenants in his Mercedes SEC. He wore a dark trench coat and was willing to negotiate. Deals sometimes included free parking, tenant improvements and even space pocketing (free space offered for future expansion). A Seattle Times profile noted that he’d host white tablecloth dinners in the upper reaches of incomplete high rises, with live music and a tenant’s future office layout spray-painted onto concrete floors. He’d even sometimes assume the old lease of a prospect who signed with him. Another Seattle office developer, Wright Runstad, lost so many companies to him they jokingly called him their single largest tenant.
And he did it mostly himself: little marketing, a small team. He ran some ads in trade magazines when he was filling up the Columbia Tower, but listed his own number as the point of contact. Even during the lean years after the Great Financial Crisis, he leased up new buildings, including a pair built on spec that opened empty in 2009.
Tech explosion
Seattle in the 2010s was the hottest real estate market in the country, Farra remembers.
Amazon’s explosive growth in South Lake Union meant the tech giant was desperate for more room. It started building a series of new offices that would eventually expand to nearly 14 million square feet of space. Tech firms based in the Bay Area opened outposts, hoping to capture the city’s talent. The population grew.
Developers rushed to build on spec. Financiers fought to provide money for cheap. The city’s commercial property hit a sub-5 percent vacancy rate, and developers expanded into secondary markets, like Bellevue and Kirkland.
“We were trying to control as much product as possible because we knew it was going to lease,” said CBRE’s Miller. “You didn’t worry much about where it was located or what the quality of the building was. You just wanted to win that assignment, because you knew that either Amazon or some other rapidly growing company was going to take it.”
Selig bet big on the city’s meteoric growth. “That doesn’t stop, right?” he told a reporter in 2019, as he started a slate of new projects. He’d taken on a mix of famous buildings and well-known addresses. One plan, a collaboration with WeWork on a WeLive space, was axed at the last minute in October 2019, but as soon as the cancellation was announced, his phones were ringing off the hook with eager potential tenants, Selig said.
One of his big swings was the redevelopment of the landmarked Federal Reserve Building, with five new glass-encased floors to be added above the original 1913 structure, a design that later won awards. The project, at 1015 Second Avenue, was supposed to open in late 2020. Selig placed one of his prized statues, Fernando Botero’s Adam, near the building entrance.
He also worked to transform the old Firestone Building, a former office for the tire company, into an office called 400 Westlake. He’d picked up the building in 2015. Now a passion project of Martin’s daughter Jordan, the Seligs planned to relaunch it as one of the world’s most environmentally friendly buildings. Going green cost 10 percent extra, but the Seligs hoped that by going well beyond the city’s sustainable building requirements, they’d attract biotech and tech companies that cared about this stuff. “We’re really pushing the edge with this project,” Jordan Selig said in a statement at the time. The badly timed groundbreaking was in February 2020.
A $240 million loan from Acore Capital was backed by the two projects.
Seattle today
The doom loop descended on Seattle, where more than a third of office space was vacant, leading to empty streets and retail closures. Things aren’t getting worse anymore. But once-vibrant neighborhoods and corridors like Third Avenue and pockets of South Lake Union remain shadows of their former selves.
Buildings simply aren’t worth what they were six years ago, and with so much sublease space on the market — 6.3 million square feet, or about 15 percent of the total office market — it’s hard to get any tenants to pay full freight, based on pre-Covid underwriting and financials. Farra calls it “working nonprofit”: Operators are trying to hang on for the next decade in hopes they can keep the keys and eventually stabilize.
A comeback isn’t obvious: It’s unclear whether the AI boom will bless the city’s real estate market as it has in San Francisco. Competition from Bellevue, located across Puget Sound and seen as a more business-friendly destination is another obstacle. Buildings there landed recent large leases from Meta, OpenAI and Anduril.
“At least 75 percent of downtown Seattle office owners are in some sort of financial distress,” Farra said. “But the ones who do not have no debt.”
Selig, of course, had debt.
“I would say Class A buildings that are in less desirable locations, as well as B and C Class buildings, have really suffered the most,” said CBRE’s Miller. “That’s where you’ve seen, in some cases, the effect on Martin Selig.”
Slipping through his hands
Selig would approach this downturn like every other one he’d previously escaped. In a letter the company penned for the Puget Sound Business Journal in December of 2020, Jordan Selig spoke of silver linings and creative problem solving. “Optimism is a choice,” she wrote. “Covid has made us extremely optimistic about tomorrow.”
By December 2021, Jordan was announcing the firm was ready to make a deal, or many deals. “We’ll get creative and be flexible in ways corporate real estate maybe can’t or won’t,” she told the Puget Sound Business Journal, suggesting openness to cut deals for temporary space across the firm’s 5 million-square-foot portfolio, if tenants made long-term commitments at a new project. At that point, the company had leased roughly three floors of the Federal Reserve project to a law firm and Deloitte.
The Seligs had to pause construction at 400 Westlake in 2020, so they hosted a second groundbreaking that September and wrapped up construction two years later. Magazines featured the cutting-edge green office, on track to be the city’s first Net Zero building. But none of its 220,000 feet were pre-leased.
In November 2022, Selig said 60 percent of the space at 400 Westlake and the Federal Reserve Building was in play with potential tenants. But the buildings never filled up: The Federal Reserve building had an 82 percent vacancy rate in 2025, while 400 Westlake was 94 percent empty, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.
The lack of leasing hurt. By the spring of 2024, $238.9 million in commercial mortgage-backed securities for Selig were deemed at risk of “imminent default” and transferred to a special servicer. The builder at the Federal Reserve building filed suit for $5.6 million in unpaid work. In late 2024, Selig’s firm said it was impossible to pay $379 million in loans due to high interest rates. It defaulted and was forced to turn over buildings to the lender. Things got worse. In March 2025, his company’s headquarters on Second Avenue was put into receivership. In April 2025, he handed 400 Westlake and the Federal Reserve building to Acore.
But the market remains stagnant. Urban Renaissance Group, which will manage both the Federal Reserve and 400 Westlake for Acore, said it will take active measures to adjust leasing strategy to fit the current market reality. A spokesperson said the firm will invest “several million dollars” into improved amenities and activation strategies to land clients for these trophy projects; asking rents haven’t been released but will adhere to “fair market lease economics.”
Where does that current market reality leave Martin Selig? He’s still “an icon,” said Miller. But: “It’s going to be very tough for him to recover to the point where he was, say, pre-Covid. But if anybody can pull a rabbit out of a hat, it’s Martin.”