Another day, another co-working space in Seattle.
Level Office, which rents offices to emerging businesses in Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Charlotte, has purchased the historic Pioneer Building at 606 First Avenue in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood with plans to transform it into a co-working office space, according to The Puget Sound Business Journal.
The purchase price of the 6-story, 72,000-square-foot building was not disclosed, but the The Daily Journal of Commerce reports that Sun Capital Corp. bought the building in January 2014 for $12.3 million.
Fees for private offices at Level Office start at $349 per month, with the company offering amenities such as high-speed Internet, meeting rooms, ergonomic chairs and more. Co-working memberships cost $199 per month.
The announcement of the new co-working space comes on the heels of a mini building boom in the co-working office space market.
Just last week, WeWork — a New York-based company that manages co-working space for 40,000 members worldwide — announced plans for its third location in Seattle with room for 600 members. Earlier this year, Denver-based Galvanize opened a 71,000 square foot co-working space and startup campus in Pioneer Square, just a few blocks away from the new space operated by Level Office.
In a guest post on Forbes this week, Level Office founder Bill Bennett said that co-working spaces have the “opportunity to disrupt the traditional real estate market.”
“Feeding off the technology boom, coworking spaces have found a niche market among startup communities and entrepreneurs by offering space that is more flexible, more efficient, and more productive than traditional office space,” wrote Bennett, a professor of real estate entrepreneurship at Northwestern University. “The growing shared space industry represents a cultural shift, as innovators can now access cool and affordable office space that provides not only the resources needed to run a business, but also the opportunity to collaborate with dynamic individuals and companies.”
He added that commercial real estate “offers an especially juicy target for disruptors, as it contains antiquated business models, is geographically diverse, and the size of the market is huge.”
Constructed of stone, red brick and cast iron, the Pioneer Building opened in 1892, and it later became the home of 48 mining companies during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. It later housed Seattle’s first speakeasy during the Prohibition era. More about the building on HistoryLink.org.
