Looking to expand its already sizable stake in Bellevue, Wash., Facebook’s parent company Meta is making a move on another 213,000 square feet of office space in the rapidly growing Spring District.
First reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal, the new lease adds another building to the company’s four in Bellevue including what was originally going to be a new REI headquarters, which Meta purchased last year for $367 million.
The new space, called Building 13, is a planned nine-story building designed by NBBJ that is expected to be completed in 2024.
This is Meta’s second grab for more space in the sprawling Spring District this year. In July, the company secured a lease for Block 5, an 11-story, 345,000-square-foot office building scheduled to open in 2023.
The expansion adds to the tech giant’s growing presence in the Seattle region, including the South Lake Union neighborhood, Bellevue and Redmond, Wash., where it has more than 7,000 employees and roughly 3.3 million square feet of office space. The social media company’s engineering hub is Meta’s largest outside of its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
The addition of more physical office space adds to the ongoing dialogue about what companies — or at least tech giants — will require for their workforces in the future, coming out of a pandemic that sped the transition to remote work for many.
The Bellevue expansion is also further evidence of Bellevue’s growing importance as a tech hub while also underscoring the growth pressure the city will continue to face.
Perhaps the best signal of Bellevue’s expected surge in growth is Amazon, which started in a small Bellevue house 27 years ago. Today, it plans to employ 25,000 people in this once sleepy suburb on the eastern shores of Lake Washington. That’s the same amount it expects to hire in Northern Virginia, or “Amazon HQ2,” as it looks beyond its Seattle headquarters amid an increasingly tense relationship with Seattle’s political leaders and policies.
