By Kate Snyder
While many tech companies are adding space in the Eastside with new and expanded leases or sublease deals, one software firm appears to be preparing to vacate space in Bellevue. According to a report from the Puget Sound Business Journal, Unity Software is giving up space – an entire floor and part of another – in the city’s Lincoln Square South building. Earlier this year, Unity announced in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it plans to reduce its staff by approximately 1,800 employees, or approximately 25 percent of its workforce, as it “restructures and refocuses on its core business, and to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.”
Lincoln Square South is located at 10400 NE Fourth St. and spans 700,000 square feet across 31 floors, according to the website for Kemper Development Company, which developed and owns the site. The building is part of the Lincoln Square campus.
Unity is a 3-D technology company based in San Francisco, according to the firm’s website. Creators use the company’s software to build and grow real-time games and apps across multiple platforms, such as mobile, computers and consoles.
As Unity reconfigures its space in Bellevue, multiple tech firms have made recent commitments to the Eastside. Recent lease deals in the Bellevue Central Business District include The Pokémon Company taking 16 floors of Skanska’s The Eight and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, making a deal for 132,000 square feet of recently vacated Microsoft space in Kemper Development’s Lincoln Square North. Online pet retailer Chewy Inc. also expanded its footprint within the One Twelfth at Twelfth building, adding a third floor that comprises roughly 24,500 square feet. This expansion doubles Chewy’s existing space in the building.
The first quarter of 2024 saw a flurry of activity in the Eastside’s office market, but it was largely driven by consolidation from three key tech players: Meta, Google and Amazon. These companies leased up 1.1 million square feet of new office space, all of it already pre-leased upon delivery. This cleared out the pre-leased sector of the development pipeline, and highlights the market’s reliance on a few major tech tenants.
This burst of activity led to a deceptive decline in vacancy, from 23.6 percent to 22.7 percent, which does not signal a reversal in the overall upward trend. In fact, most Eastside submarkets saw little change in available space or tenant demand, according to a recent first quarter 2024 Eastside Office market report from global brokerage firm Colliers.
