Looking at Seattle’s current growth and construction rates paints a good picture for the rest of Puget Sound real estate. However Seattle is doing is usually a pretty good indicator for how the region is doing. Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, so does Seattle’s growth support the entire region.

Presently Seattle’s downtown growth is continuing at a torrent pace. At of the end of 2018, there were 66 projects currently in the works, valued at $4.8B in development (no wonder Seattle leads the nation in the latest crane count). This includes 6.4M square feet of NEW office space…for perspective, this is the equivalent of about 50% of all of Bellevue’s office space combined. It’s like we’re currently building half a Bellevue in Downtown Seattle.

If we’re adding a net of 5,323,092 square feet of office space (because about 1,108,000 is being demolished to make way for the 6,431,092 of new space), how many office workers do we need to add to fill that? Apparently, the general rule of thumb is about 175 square feet per person. Therefore, developers are betting that Seattle businesses will be able to add about 30,417 new jobs in the coming years.

However, let’s just say that in the next few years we hit only two-thirds of that number above, and end up adding only 20,075 new jobs in Seattle. Given the average salary in Seattle is $69,687, adding 18,250 new jobs to the region would account for an economic boon of $1,398,967,000 new Seattle income. [Anecdotally] about 35% of this usually finds its way into housing.

Amazon made news this past week stating they were backing out of their proposed Rainier Square lease. This is was scary at first. And then we realize that as soon as they finish what they’re currently building they’ll have 14 MILLION square feet of office space in Seattle.

- Did you know that number accounts for about 28% of the total Class A office space in the city?
- Or that the 43 next biggest companies in Seattle only occupy a little over 8 million square feet?
- And that 14 million square feet of office space exceeds the entire square footage of downtown Bellevue?

Summary

Regardless of the housing market, which is on pretty sturdy footing at the moment, Seattle is doing well. A major piece of the equation for homebuyers to consider as they evaluate an investment in Seattle or Puget Sound real estate.