Dive Brief:

• Facebook will take over two Seattle office buildings in the third quarter of 2018, giving the company room to potentially double its capacity in the city from 2,000 employees to 4,000, according to the Seattle Times.
• The company will lease the $246 million yet-to-be-built properties from Vulcan Real Estate, owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
• The buildings, which total about 384,000 square feet, are located in Seattle’s South Lake Union area, which is also home to Amazon and Google. Industry insiders had originally pegged Amazon as the new tenant for Vulcan’s latest project.

Dive Insight:

Google is also moving into South Lake Union and has contracted with Vulcan to build a unique space. Vulcan is constructing more than 600,000 square feet of offices for the search engine giant, and the building will also include 14,000 square feet of retail and 151 residential units on upper levels. When the new offices are finished, Google will have almost 1 million-square-feet of space in Washington.  

Facebook moved into its Frank Gehry-designed Seattle offices in May, making it the company’s largest engineering operation outside of Menlo Park. The social media giant said it selected Seattle in order to take advantage of the talent pool emerging from University of Washington as well as from rival companies that have set up shop there. As of its Seattle opening, the company only had 1,000 employees working in the area.

Facebook had to break out the benefits at home recently in order to gain approval for a significant expansion at its Menlo Park headquarters. The city was concerned about the estimated 6,500 additional employees and how they would impact traffic and the already-limited supply of affordable housing. However, the city approved the 1.1 million-square-foot expansion after the company agreed to provide millions in community benefits from scholarships to the creation of an affordable housing fun.