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On the rooftop at Arbor Blocks 333 in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)
Apple is taking a big bite out of the Seattle commercial estate market with a new 193,000 square-foot lease in a building previously occupied by Meta.
A new report from Colliers described the lease as a direct deal at the Arbor Blocks 333 building in South Lake Union near downtown Seattle, just south of Amazon’s headquarters.
Meta, which moved into the building in 2019, terminated its lease early to “make way for Apple,” according to the report. The space was originally listed as a sublease. Meta said in January 2023 that it was subleasing its 6-story office at Arbor Blocks 333.
Colliers described Apple’s new lease as the largest in Seattle since 2019, before the pandemic sent tech workers home and started the hybrid work trend that drove up vacancy rates above 30%.
Office vacancy rates in Seattle have risen steadily since the pandemic began. (Colliers Chart)
Apple first announced its plans for a major expansion in Seattle in 2019. The company said at the time that it would grow to 2,000 employees in the city over the next five years, calling Seattle a “key engineering hub.”
Apple has existing offices at the 333 Dexter Building in South Lake Union.
We’ve reached out to Apple and will update this story if we hear back.
The tech giant is one of more than 100 companies that have engineering outposts in the Seattle area, tapping into the region’s robust tech talent pool.
Zoom and OpenAI recently opened new offices in nearby Bellevue, where Snowflake, ByteDance, and Pokémon are also expanding.
Meta has thousands of employees across the Seattle area at multiple offices in Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond. It still occupies Arbor Blocks 300, which is just across from Arbor Blocks 333.
The Puget Sound Business Journal originally broke the news of Apple’s new lease in November, and the Seattle Times reported on the new lease Tuesday.
Previously: Bellevue real estate brokers bullish about Amazon’s new return-to-office policy as Microsoft moves out
