Amazon.com continues to gobble up office space in its hometown, expanding with a new 10-year lease for about 140,000 square feet at the Metropolitan Park North building.
The lease, which was signed last month, was reported today by The Seattle Times.
The new space is located at 1220 Howell Street, and brokers tell the Times that Amazon has taken over about 2.7 million square feet in the South Lake Union and Denny Triangle neighborhoods in the past two years.
The deal also comes a few months after Amazon.com purchased its South Lake Union headquarters from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. for more than $1.1 billion.
The company also is moving forward with plans for 3.3 million square feet of space in the Denny Triangle area of Seattle, part of a plan for a new campus that borders downtown.
Amazon’s worldwide headcount is on the rise, as the chart below shows.
The lease adds about 140,000 square feet to the tech giant’s rapidly expanding footprint around South Lake Union.
Office brokers said the lease is the latest sign of Amazon’s strong influence on the Seattle office market. The company has moved into more than 2.7 million square feet in South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle since spring 2010, brokers say.
“This is presumably another large block of space that gets them through the interim period until the new buildings on the new campus can be completed and ready for move in,” said Matt Christian, executive director of brokerage Cushman & Wakefield/Commerce in Seattle.
In January 2012, Amazon agreed to buy three Denny Triangle blocks from Seattle’s Clise family and unveiled plans for a 3.3 million-square-foot high-rise office complex, downtown’s biggest development ever.
Then last spring, San Francisco-based Spear Street Capital broke ground on 202 Westlake without a tenant. Amazon agreed to lease all 110,000 square feet of that building.
Now, Met Park North, known to longtime area residents as one of the “Twin Toasters”: The building, located across from the 235-room Marriott SpringHill Suites and next to the on-ramp to Interstate 5, houses a 24 Hour Fitness gym and is near the transit tunnel.
Spear Street, a real estate investment company, bought Met Park North in March 2012 in a foreclosure sale and signed the lease with Amazon last month, county records show.
“It’s a home run for Spear Street,” Christian said. “They’ll presumably have that building for sale by year-end and have a strong return for a short hold.”
Spear Street did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
