Google continues to grow its Seattle-area footprint despite the ongoing pandemic.
The tech giant just finalized its purchase of the Kirkland Urban East plot, a Google spokesperson confirmed. The purchase price was $40 million, King County property records show. Business Insider first reported the news.
“Google finalized the purchase of the Kirkland Urban East plot, which will complete the Kirkland Urban site and serve as additional space for long-term growth in the area,” a Google spokesperson said.
The purchase is Google’s latest deal at Kirkland Urban, a new development in Kirkland, Wash, just east of Seattle.
The company last year bought about 400,000 square feet of office space across the North and Central buildings at Kirkland Urban. It paid $435.7 million for those two buildings.
The expansion comes despite a pandemic that has forced some companies to pull back on physical office space with a shift to remote work. Outdoor retailer REI said earlier this month that it will look to sell its brand new HQ in nearby Bellevue, Wash. due to the pandemic.
Google is allowing employees to work remotely until July 2021.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in April that the company would slow hiring due to the economic crisis. It is also slashing marketing budgets in the latter half of 2020.
Google parent Alphabet beat estimates for its second quarter earnings with $38.3 billion in revenue, though it had the company’s first quarterly year-over-year revenue decline ever.
Shares of Alphabet are up nearly 50% since March.
Google continues growing Seattle-area workforce
Google already has a huge separate campus in Kirkland, the Seattle suburb where it first set up shop 16 years ago.
Since then, Google has grown to around 2 million square feet of office space spread across several cities in the area, including a Google Cloud campus in Amazon’s backyard of South Lake Union in Seattle that opened last year.
The company leased two additional buildings in Kirkland earlier this year. Its Seattle-area real estate portfolio gives the tech giant room for more than 10,000 people.
Google has more than 5,750 employees total in the region working on everything from Android technology to cloud computing. There are nearly 700 open jobs based in the Seattle area.
There are now more than 130 companies from around the globe that have set up engineering outposts in and around Seattle. But recent layoffs at companies including Airbnb and Uber makes the future of at least some of these outposts as an engine for tech job growth more uncertain.
In a recent report covering the Seattle office market, Broderick Group found that remote work is “certainly a long-term trend” but noted that “it will not be the death of office space.”
In a separate report, commercial real estate company JLL said a steady influx of sublease listings are now coming on the market in Seattle.
Kirkland Urban is also home to an office for Seattle-based Tableau Software, which signed a lease for 92,000 square feet on three floors of Urban North. Virtual golf center Topgolf and popular burger chain Shake Shack are also tenants.
Editor’s note: This story was updated with more details about Google’s Kirkland Urban land and building purchases.
