Report: Amazon thought to be on verge of buying Bellevue property
Feb 15, 2019, 3:36 PM | Updated: 3:40 pm
(Sounder Bruce, Flickr Creative Commons)
(Sounder Bruce, Flickr Creative Commons)
A report from the Puget Sound Business Journal Friday claimed that Amazon is zeroing in on a deal to buy its first property in Bellevue.
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According to sources close to the Business Journal, Amazon has put down non-refundable money on the 10-story Bellevue Corporate Plaza property on 108th Avenue North.
Amazon has yet to respond to a request for comment on the possible deal, but it would represent an intriguing move for the tech giant, following its decision to end its plans for a headquarters in New York.
A potential purchase of property on the Eastside wouldn’t be Amazon’s first foray into the area. Amazon already has approximately 2,000 employees in Bellevue, recently leased Expedia’s former headquarters in the city, and plans to have around 4,500 total employees there by 2020.
This all comes during a time when Bellevue is rising to meet Seattle as a true metropolitan competitor.
“I think [Bellevue] really is on par now — I would say it absolutely is a competitor to Seattle,” Windermere Real Estate Chief Economist Matthew Gardner told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross in early-February.
And while companies like Amazon only recently decided to make inroads into the Eastside, that trend actually started almost two decades ago.
“This whole thing started with Symetra Financial back in the late ‘90s, creating their global headquarters in Bellevue and not Seattle,” described Gardner. “Everyone wondered why, and essentially their decision was made around ‘where did their employees work, and we want to be closer to them.’”
Amazon’s plans in Seattle following its decision to pull out of New York are unclear at this point. Conflicting reports have popped up, with some claiming the company has no new plans to expand its operation in the city, while an official statement from Amazon claimed that it “will continue to evaluate future growth.”
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