Amazon.com Exits Office in Seattle in Shift to Bellevue

Amazon.com is bailing out of a building in Seattle as it shifts many of its workers across Lake Washington to Bellevue.

The locally based e-commerce giant has allowed its lease to lapse for five floors in Met Park North at 1220 Howell Street in the Denny Triangle, north of Downtown, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported.

Amazon had signed a lease in 2013 from then-landlord Spear Street Capital, based in San Francisco. The 189,500-square-foot building is now owned by Los Angeles-based Hudson Pacific Properties, which bought it that year for $106.4 million, or $561 per square foot.

Amazon was poised to move out in March last year, but then renewed its lease in October for two more years. The renewed terms “were later revised,” an Amazon spokesperson said, leading to its current exit. Its 800 workers have been relocated across greater Seattle.

“We’re always evaluating our office footprint based on the needs of our business,” the unidentified spokesperson told the Business Journal in an email.

The Broderick Group, the broker for the building, lists 147,000 square feet of offices in Met Park North for lease starting Dec. 1. Ground-floor tenants include a 24 Hour Fitness and a Subway.

Across the street, at Met Park East, San Francisco-based Pinterest just inked a deal for 21,500 square feet, the tech firm’s first permanent office in Seattle. Other nearby tenants at Met Park West include Axon, which makes equipment for the military and law enforcement.

In recent years, Amazon has slowly shifted workers east, as it expands its headquarters definition to include offices beyond its core campus around Downtown Seattle.

Its “Puget Sound headquarters” now encompasses a growing campus in Bellevue, where the company plans to station more than 25,000 employees by next year .

Amazon is still building offices in the city, but by December there will be 17,500 employees in Bellevue, the company said.

The company also has 2,000 workers in Redmond, where it leases a 178,000-square-foot, three-building office complex at 185th Avenue NE.

— Dana Bartholomew