BELLEVUE, Wash. — With an asking price of $2.28 million, the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house at 10704 NE 28th St. is one of the most affordable single-family homes on the market in this community east of Seattle.
But the bigger draw for many who visited an open house Saturday afternoon was the history of the place. This was the home that Jeff Bezos rented in the mid-1990s to launch the company that became Amazon.com.
“I just wanted to see where it all started,” said Manan Patel, an Amazon employee who was one of numerous people with connections to the company who were among the steady stream of visitors at the open house.
The listing team made sure that the home’s history was clear to anyone who visited. Tyler Li, who works for the listing agents Lin Shen and Mina Zhang of Sea to Sky Realty, went to great lengths to create a life-sized replica of the blue “Amazon.com” sign that can be seen behind Bezos in historical photos of the Amazon founder.
The idea that such an influential company came from such humble beginnings is “a very inspiring story,” Li said. By promoting the house’s history, he said, the listing team wanted not only to increase foot traffic to help in the sale of the house, but also to share the story with everyone.
For the open house this weekend, the replica of the sign was placed on a workbench in the garage along with a small collection of framed photos and newspaper articles.
The listing for the home reads, “Welcome to the birthplace of Amazon. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in the humble garage of this West Bellevue house in 1994.”
It notes that the home was “rebuilt in 2001 to offer modern comfort and style.”
That renovation more than two decades ago makes it tough to pinpoint exactly where Bezos was sitting at the time, but that didn’t seem to matter to those who visited. Many stopped next to the display in the garage to have their photos taken, some of them leaving without going inside to see the rest of the home.
At an asking price of nearly $2.3 million, the home is also a symbol of the price appreciation and shrinking affordability that has accompanied the Seattle-area tech boom over the past decade, driven by the growth of Amazon and other companies. The house last sold for $1.53 million in 2019, up from $620,000 a decade prior.
Two more pieces of historical trivia:
- The home previously featured an oversized mailbox, believed to have been used by Bezos and early employees to accommodate book catalogs they received to help stock their fledgling online bookstore. The mailbox has been replaced, and appears to have been lost to history.
- When Bezos initially rented the home, the company was known as Cadabra, a reference to “abracadabra.” The company changed its name to Amazon after people on the phone misheard it as “cadaver.”
With a well-kept backyard and vaulted interior ceilings on a quiet suburban street, it should serve as a very nice home for whomever ends up buying it this time. But of course, Bezos has significantly upgraded his digs over the past three decades. The billionaire announced last year that he was officially moving to Miami, and reportedly bought a $79 million mansion in Florida last fall.
