Industrial

Seattle has come a long way since the 1971 billboard reading “will the last person leaving Seattle turn the lights off?” The greater Seattle economy and real estate market has continued to be one of the nation’s top- performing locales, even exceeding its prior 2007 peak. Large corporations such as Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks, along with many independent startup companies, have rapidly reduced the unemployment rate, which has dropped to 4.8 percent. The construction pipeline in Seattle remains robust. With more than 20 cranes working on new developments, the market has the most active projects underway since the Downtown Seattle Associations started tracking development in 2005. Nearly two-thirds of construction in Seattle is residential, with more than 5,000 new apartment units opening since January 2013, and more than 6,000 new units to be completed in the next three years, according to the DSA report. During the past year, the amount of office space under construction has nearly doubled from 1.7 million square feet to more than 3.2 million square feet. A large contributor to this is Amazon’s revitalization of the South Lake Union area. Amazon’s global workforce has doubled in the past two years, and the company is reportedly …