We’ve been writing a lot of about the tech renaissance going on in Pioneer Square, one of Seattle’s most historic neighborhoods. From Isilon/EMC to HTC to Zynga to a countless array of startups, Pioneer Square is dueling with South Lake Union for title of hottest tech hood. (We saw this play out last year in the voting at the GeekWire Awards for Geekiest coffee shop, a tight race between Pioneer Square’s Zeitgest and SLU’s Uptown Espresso. Uptown ultimately won).
Now, Bryan Rush of Colliers has taken some of his firm’s market intelligence and put it to work in the form of this nifty tech map for Pioneer Square.
As you see, there’s a lot going on in Pioneer Square, from recently acquired companies like Isilon/EMC and DoubleDown Interactive to tech giants like HTC and Intel (which just took over 50,000 square feet at Union Station). Of course, startups have always loved some of the quirky brick office spaces of Pioneer Square too, one of the reasons young upstarts like Yabbly and Symform call the neighborhood home.
“Pioneer Square’s appeal has been on the rise and it seems that creative firms and technology firms are the primary change drivers,” writes Rush in an accompanying blog post in which he also notes that vacancy rates are declining and rents are increasing.
With Amazon.com gobbling up everything in sight in South Lake Union, including a report today of even more office space, startups don’t have many options in those parts. That means companies are expanding where they look, considering other neighborhoods like Pioneer Square, Fremont and, even Ballard (GeekWire’s home base).
Just the other day, I bumped into a tech company that’s located in the South Lake Union area, just a few blocks from Amazon’s HQ. But they just got word that they’ll have to move, in part because the building in which they are housed is being torn down.
Previously on GeekWire: Pictures: 10 coolest startup spaces in Seattle’s Pioneer Square…Seattle’s Pioneer Square has tech, needs tribe
Editor’s note: GeekWire will be hosting our first Meetup of the year at the super cool new offices of HUB Seattle in Pioneer Square. Details and tickets here.
