Google has snapped up Tableau Software’s former headquarters space in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, an indication the tech giant is not content to wait for its massive new office campus in Amazon’s backyard of South Lake Union to be built.
Google subleased two floors in an office building at 837 N. 34th St., GeekWire has learned, which is also home to Geocaching HQ. Last year, Google signed a deal with Tableau to sublease the former Sound Mind & Body Gym space, data visualization company transformed into approximately 50,000 square feet of tech office space in 2014 for its engineering team.
These deals come as Google prepares to move thousands of employees to its future South Lake Union campus. Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate is developing the campus, which will have more than 600,000 square feet of office space for Google on two city blocks with apartments above. Work began last May on the project, which was announced in 2016, and it will be complete in early 2019.
Today, Google employs 3,000 people at offices in the Fremont neighborhood and the Eastside suburb of Kirkland, Wash., up from 1,900 just shy of two years ago. Google hasn’t said what it plans to do with its Fremont space once the new Seattle campus is ready, but the latest deals show it remains invested in the neighborhood, for now.
Tableau, which snapped up pretty much all available space in the Fremont neighborhood over the last few years, offered up a few different properties for sublease last year as it consolidated employees into its new HQ in the Northedge building and another new building it leased in the neighborhood. Google has since taken most of the sublease space, except for a building at 1441 N. 34th St. that Tableau leased in 2015.
We’ve reached out to Tableau for more details about its remaining sublease space and will update this post if we hear back.
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., first expanded to the Seattle region in 2004, leading a wave of Silicon Valley tech companies that have since opened engineering centers in the area, seeking to capitalizing on the pool of engineering talent coming out of the University of Washington and companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Google and Tableau are among a growing cadre of tech companies with offices on both sides of Lake Washington. In 2016, Google opened the expansion of its Kirkland campus. Also in 2016, Tableau confirmed plans to lease three floors, totaling 92,000 square feet, at a new mixed-use development in Kirkland called Kirkland Urban.
