In downtown Seattle, total office vacancy is now around 35%, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE, and rents are softening. That’s even worse than during the Great Recession, when downtown Seattle office vacancy reached around 21%.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOPM
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    24 days ago

    There’s been a lot of construction around the country, I wonder how other cities are faring. They’re even talking about changing some of these buildings to residential through urban planning. Is this the start of the bubble popping?

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksM
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      24 days ago

      Seattle’s situation may change once Amazon starts enforcing their full-time return-to-office policy in 2025. I expect other companies will follow suit. Though in the mean time there is more room for the office market to fall; another Seattle Times article from August mentioned:

      Seattle’s downtown is now second only to San Francisco’s for risk of office loan foreclosures, according to a recent analysis by Kaplan Group, a debt collection firm, which warns that high-risk cities “could see a wave of loan defaults or even localized fire sales.”

      I would love to see some of that empty office space convert to other uses. Every city’s office/retail core feels soulless if nobody lives there, or even has a reason to go there after 5pm.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksOPM
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        23 days ago

        I don’t wish the market to full on pop, but a mini pop would be nice. You can’t build, build, build, price fix and then expect to have a nice city that people can or want to live in.