Microsoft’s choice to resume a big swath of workplace house in Redmond is rising as a key stabilizing power for the Eastside workplace market close to Seattle.
That’s one takeaway from a brand new report by industrial actual property agency Broderick Group, which highlighted Microsoft’s renewal for 396,228 sq. toes at Redmond City Middle, simply north of the corporate’s essential headquarters campus. The deal was one of many largest workplace transactions on the Eastside in 2025.
Microsoft confirmed the brand new lease when contacted by GeekWire. The tech big additionally confirmed a report from the Seattle Occasions that it’s reoccupying house on the Millennium Company Park location in Redmond, the place it has about 480,000 sq. toes. The corporate had beforehand supplied that house for sublease.
Whereas Microsoft was liable for a number of the area’s largest house givebacks final yr — together with a 750,000-square-foot discount at The Bravern in Bellevue — the newest commitments recommend the corporate is holding onto its remaining footprint because it begins imposing a brand new return-to-office coverage. This previous September the corporate introduced that it might implement a three-day in-office requirement, beginning throughout the Seattle area in February earlier than increasing to different U.S. areas and finally globally.
Each Microsoft and Amazon — and their respective in-office insurance policies — look like enjoying an outsized position in figuring out how rapidly the Eastside’s workplace restoration takes form, whilst general emptiness reached 21.8% within the fourth quarter.
Amazon, which final yr elevated its personal in-office coverage from three to 5 days every week, continues constructing out main initiatives in Bellevue, together with Bellevue 600, The Artise, and West Predominant. The corporate employs greater than 12,000 folks in Bellevue as a part of what it calls its “Puget Sound headquarters” which additionally consists of its Seattle campus. Amazon reduce 14,000 employees in broad layoffs in October, with 2,303 company staff in Washington state.
A rising roster of know-how corporations has additionally signed new or expanded leases on the Eastside in recent times, together with OpenAI, Snap, Anduril, Shopify, Snowflake, Walmart, and Chewy.
“Notably, a rising variety of new-to-market entrants … are selecting the Eastside over Seattle, drawn by Bellevue’s fashionable workplace stock, enterprise pleasant local weather and expert know-how workforce,” Broderick’s report famous.
Regardless of the optimistic indicators, the agency cautioned that emptiness is unlikely to fall sharply within the close to time period. Downtown Bellevue’s emptiness price stood at 25.4% on the finish of the yr.
The report additionally famous that greater than 1% of the Eastside’s workplace stock has been eliminated by means of office-to-residential conversions.
