Big tech office leases cluster in the Seattle market

Seattle can lay claim to one title amid the ongoing struggle of its commercial real estate landscape: busiest market in the world for big tech office leases.

The basis for the boast is data from Savills, which compared the five biggest leases in the tech sector across various markets over the first half of the year, the Seattle Times reports. The data indicate that the top five leases in the Seattle metro area accounted for 1 million square feet.

That’s more than 10 percent ahead of second-place Los Angeles, and about twice the total for San Francisco, a traditional top market for tech, and the third-ranked entry for the first half of the year. Delhi was the highest-ranked market outside the U.S. in fourth place.

The big tech leases are bright spots in an otherwise downbeat office market in Seattle.

Savills pegs the commercial district availability rate in Seattle at 31 percent, with Bellevue around 20 percent.

The clutch of big leases in Seattle came even as some of the largest tech companies with a presence in the area trimmed office space. Homegrown Amazon.com and Microsoft, for example, have vacated entire office towers in the market in recent years.

The leases on Savills’ list, on the other hand, reflect out-of-town outfits beefing up their footprints in the Seattle market, with suburban Bellevue accounting for the lion’s share of the big deals, which include:

➤ Pokémon – 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