By Meghan Hall
Bellevue has been a hotbed of leasing and development activity in recent months, with hundreds of housing units, Seattle’s Light Rail Line and major companies like REI establishing their headquarters in the neighborhood. Facebook Inc. has recently solidified its interest in the town’s 36-acre Spring District, inking a 13-year lease for the property jointly developed by Shorenstein and Wright Runstad, according to sources familiar with the details of the deal. The 11-story Block 16 building is located at 1227 124th Ave. NE in Bellevue.
The property has 316,009 square feet of office space on levels two through 11, plus 12,807 square feet of retail space on level one, for a total building footprint of 311,233 square feet. According to Broderick Group’s website, the brokerage firm leading the leasing efforts for the developers, the building has views of Bellevue, Seattle and the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, as well as terrace and public park spaces. The building is designed to LEED-ND standards and has a parking ratio of 3 spots per 1,000 square feet.
Brokers Grant Yerke and Matt Schreck were responsible for leasing the building, which was available to tenants beginning in January 2020.
The Spring District is located along the Bellevue-Redmond Corridor, and it one of the most active, under development areas of the Eastside at the moment. The area will be developed into a mixed-use urban neighborhood over the course of three phases. The first phase, which began in 2017, will include 805 residential units, six office buildings, Brewpub, an urban park and buildings for both GIX and REI. When the subsequent two phases are entirely complete, there will be 3.8 million square feet of office and street level retail, 1,100 residential units and a 209,000 square foot hotel. The office, retail, residential and hotel space combined will total nearly 5.3 million square feet.
Bellevue has become increasingly popular with large tech companies in recent months, particularly Facebook, who also recently leased 47,396 square feet in Civica Office Commons, owned by Unico Properties. In October 2018, Facebook leased 85,000 square feet in Skyline Tower and Key Center, both owned by Kilroy Realty, while it also submitted plans for a 650,000 square foot campus called Building X in Redmond.
Developers have taken notice of tech’s expansion into the area; according to Kidder Mathews’ Fourth Quarter Seattle Office Report, five buildings totaling 1.15 million square feet had plans to break ground in January 2019, although at the end of the year Block 16 was the only project under construction. Sources estimate that Facebook, should it maintain all of its leases in the area, will become one of the largest office tenants in the region behind Microsoft Corp., Boeing and Amazon.
