Facebook has inked a lease for 275,000 square feet of office space in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, a massive chunk of space that could accommodate as many as 2,000 employees.
Bloomberg — citing a person with knowledge of the matter — reports that the social networking giant plans to occupy the Dexter Station building, a recently completed 10-story building just a few blocks away from Amazon.com’s growing campus.
A real estate source confirmed the report for GeekWire, saying that Facebook has secured all but two floors in the building. However, the company has options on those floors as well, the source said.
It’s no secret that Facebook is looking for new office space in Seattle to accommodate its fast-growing staff in the region.
The 351,731 square-foot building, with 14-foot tall ceilings and floor plates that range in size from 24,000 square feet to 53,000 square feet, boasts locker rooms, an on-site athletic facility and outdoor decks with sweeping views of Lake Union and downtown Seattle. In 2013, Dexter Station architect LMN called the building — built speculatively — a “Ferrari” for tech firms.
Facebook has been looking to boost its footprint in Seattle for many months, with previous speculation that it was targeting the top floors at the downtown Macy’s.
Facebook currently leases about 100,000 square-feet across six floors at the Metropolitan Park towers, employing 400 workers in Seattle. It is the company’s largest engineering outpost outside of Menlo Park, California, and a recent expansion at the building would give the company enough room to employ 800 workers.
In an interview with GeekWire last month, Facebook Seattle site lead Paul Carduner noted that the company would continue to grow in the region.
“Seattle is just a hotbed of awesome talent,” said Carduner at the time. “We have a bunch of companies that have been here for a long time, building up Seattle as this great technology hub. It’s been a huge boon for us to be here. … There’s a lot of room for us to grow in this market.”
Facebook is one of many Silicon Valley tech giants that have chosen to grow engineering offices in Seattle, joining companies such as Google, Salesforce, Twitter and more recent arrivals such as Apple, Oracle, HP and Dropbox. (Previously on GeekWire: From Apple and Alibaba to Salesforce and Splunk: A guide to tech giants with outposts in Seattle).
Those companies are changing the dynamic of Seattle’s tech community, diversifying the community while also making it more competitive for existing companies to hire engineers.
Facebook first arrived in Seattle in 2010, moving to its current building at Metropolitan Park in 2012. The company employed 9,199 staffers at the end of 2014.
Facebook is hosting a press briefing next Wednesday where more details of the office expansion may be discussed.
