The Pioneer Collective co-working space is located in the historic Guiry Schillestad Building at 2101 1st Ave. in Seattle. (TPC Photo)
The Pioneer Collective is expanding its co-working space in the Belltown neighborhood of downtown Seattle.
TPC is taking over 6,600 square feet of space directly above its current location in the historic Guiry Schillestad Building at 2101 1st Ave. The new footprint is just under 20,000 square feet.
The space, just a block from the Pike Place Market, was previously home to outdoor retailer Orvis and prior to that, Urban Hardwoods.
TPC, which was founded in 2014 by husband-and-wife team Christopher Hoyt and Audrey Hoyt, operates other co-working locations in Ballard, at the West Canal Yards development near Interbay, and in Tacoma, Wash.
TPC will gain 6,600 square feet of space at its Belltown location. (TPC Photo)
“Even with the challenges downtown has faced, Belltown has been a great neighborhood for us,” TPC CEO Christopher Hoyt said in a news release. “Almost since opening, we’ve wanted more space at this location and we’re excited that we finally have the opportunity to expand.”
The expansion will give TPC extra meeting room capacity and additional private offices for teams of up to 10 employees. The project is currently in permit review and construction is expected to begin in February with an opening date planned for late summer.
Seattle’s co-working market ranks 14th nationally by total co-working square footage, with roughly 3.16 million square feet across about 160 spaces.
The newly named JPMorganChase Center in downtown Seattle, previously known as the Russell Investments Center, is home to JPMorganChase’s Seattle Tech Center. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)
One of Seattle’s tallest skyscrapers has a new name that reflects JPMorganChase’s growing banking and technology hub in Seattle.
Formerly known as the Russell Investments Center, the building at 1301 Second Ave. is now the JPMorganChase Center.
The renaming coincides with JPMorganChase adding an additional 40,000 square feet at the 42-floor tower, which also houses Zillow Group and Perkins Coie.
The financial services giant, which now occupies 128,000 square feet, is also relocating its Seattle Tech Center from 1201 Third Ave. to the newly expanded space.
JPMorganChase has 850 employees in Seattle, including 400 tech workers — that’s up slightly from 380 people last year.
The company’s Seattle Tech Center opened in 2018, in part to tap into the region’s talent pool. The center focuses on areas including cybersecurity, cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. It’s led by Mamtha Banerjee, a computer scientist, business leader, and Seattle startup veteran.
JPMorganChase implemented a five-day in-office policy last year. It has more than 2,220 employees across 150 branches and corporate offices in Washington state. There are about 320,000 employees globally. The company recently opened a new headquarters in Manhattan.
The company also on Wednesday anounced $1.5 million in grants to five Seattle-area nonprofits: Business Impact NW, Friends of Little Saigon, Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, Seattle University’s RAMP-up, and the Capitol Hill EcoDistrict program of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle.
The office expansion comes as downtown Seattle hit another record high for vacancy rate last year at 34.7% in Q4, as hybrid work continues to weigh on the commercial real estate market.
Zillow once filled several floors of the JPMorganChase Center but scaled down after committing to remote work during the pandemic. More than 70% of the Zillow’s workforce is made up of remote employees.
Russell Investments moved its Seattle headquarters last year from 1301 Second Ave. to nearby Rainier Square.
Downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Taylor Soper)
Tech companies are still signing leases in downtown Seattle — but it’s not enough to reverse a pandemic-era slide that pushed office vacancy to another record high, reaching 34.7% in Q4.
The latest numbers from commercial real estate firm CBRE underscore how hybrid work and shrinking office footprints continue to weigh on a tech-heavy market like Seattle. The vacancy rate is up about two percentage points from a year ago, and a fivefold increase from before the pandemic.
Downtown Seattle lost 257,879 square feet of occupied space in Q4, driven by tenant “rightsizing” and reductions in average space requirements, according to CBRE.
Tech companies are still boosting leasing activity in downtown. Impinj renewed and expanded into 73,638 square feet at 400 Fairview, while DAT Solutions (which acquired Seattle startup Outgo last year) and Docker both took sublease space at the Maritime Building along the waterfront — 51,777 and 33,757 square feet, respectively.
But the data shows how Seattle’s commercial real estate market continues to struggle amid remote work and broader pressures including tech layoffs and companies using AI to operate with leaner teams. CoStar reported in November that Seattle recorded the slowest rent growth among the nation’s largest markets over the past year.
Data from CBRE.
Meanwhile, the Eastside is showing early signs of stabilization, fueled in part by Microsoft’s new leases in Redmond and Amazon’s continued buildout in downtown Bellevue. Both companies are enforcing return-to-office policies.
Several technology companies have signed new or expanded leases on the Eastside in recent years, including OpenAI, Snap, Anduril, Shopify, Snowflake, Walmart, and Chewy.
“Notably, a growing number of new-to-market entrants … are choosing the Eastside over Seattle, drawn by Bellevue’s modern office inventory, business friendly climate and skilled technology workforce,” Broderick Group wrote in a new report.
Despite the positive signals, Broderick cautioned that vacancy is unlikely to fall sharply in the near term. Downtown Bellevue’s vacancy rate stood at 25.4% at the end of Q4, up from 16.8% a year ago.
The debate over private listings and pre-marketing in Washington state could soon reach a turning point if a bill requiring the public marketing of residential properties advances in the state legislature.
Washington Realtors is backing SB6091, a new draft bill aimed at curbing exclusive home marketing practices — while stopping short of mandating MLS participation. The trade group informed members of the effort on Jan. 9 in preparation for the start of Washington’s short legislative session this week. The organization shared the draft bill with Real Estate News and other media outlets on Jan. 12; Inman was first to report on the initiative.
‘As consumer-friendly’ as possible
Ryan Beckett, Washington Realtors’ 2026 president, said the measure is designed to prioritize consumers rather than settle industry disputes over platforms or listing strategies. The draft bill would prohibit real estate brokers from marketing residential properties to a limited or exclusive group of buyers or brokers unless the property is also marketed publicly at the same time.
“The ultimate goal is being as consumer-friendly as humanly possible for anybody trying to buy or sell real property,” Beckett said of the effort. “When we keep having these conversations about private listing networks, we recognize that it really is at odds with that concept.”
Under the bill, brokers would still be free to use private listing networks or other selective marketing strategies — but only if the listing is also made available publicly “in some way, shape or form,” Beckett explained.
“We’re not telling anybody they can’t use a private listing network, or that they can’t market their property the way they want to,” he said. “But if you do go forward with that particular strategy, you also have to make it available publicly.”
MLS entry not required: ‘We’re not giving parameters’
Unlike the National Association of Realtors’ Clear Cooperation Policy, the bill does not tie compliance to MLS rules or require brokers to include their listings in the MLS. Beckett emphasized that the language in the bill is intentionally platform-neutral.
“Publicly marketing could be as simple as putting it on your website,” he said. “We’re not telling you you have to have it in the MLS. We’re not giving parameters other than saying it does need to be publicly available to the community.”
A state effort with no industry partnerships involved
Washington isn’t the first state to attempt to codify residential listing access in state law.
Just last month, the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill requiring residential properties to be marketed “on one or more Internet platforms or websites accessible to the general public” within one business day of a signed listing agreement, unless the seller completes and signs a state-mandated disclosure form. The law is set to go into effect in January 2027.
A similar bill was introduced in Illinois last year — and in that case, Zillow was a key partner in the effort. But in Washington, Beckett said his organization deliberately avoided framing the bill as a response to specific companies or industry rivalries.
“Zillow and Compass are both members of our organization,” he said. “We hate getting involved where members are being pitted against one another. We tried very, very hard to stay out of that completely.”
“For us, that’s the big key — just making sure there’s enough transparency out there that consumers in the market are aware of what’s available,” Beckett said.
The legislation does include limited carve-outs for sellers with health, safety or confidentiality concerns, however, including in situations where medical issues would require limiting the number of people entering a home. Beckett said some of those exceptions already exist in state law, with others clarified in the new bill.
The bill has bipartisan support in both legislative chambers: In the Senate, sponsors include Sens. Marco Liias (D-21), Emily Alvarado (D-34), Chris Gildon (R-25), John Braun (R-20) and Jessica Bateman (D-22); in the House, the bill is sponsored by Reps. Strom Peterson (D-21) and April Connors (R-8), Washington Realtors told Real Estate News.
Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman at the 2018 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire File Photo / Dan DeLong)
Glenn Kelman, the longtime CEO of Redfin and one of the most recognizable leaders in the U.S. real estate industry, is stepping down.
Kelman’s departure comes six months after Redfin completed its $1.75 billion acquisition to Rocket Companies. His last day is Friday.
“Redfin just completed our first phase as a Rocket company, integration,” Kelman wrote in an email to employees that he also posted on LinkedIn. “We’ll start the second, much-longer phase at next week’s all-company meeting, which is much-greater scale. Approaching that, I had to decide whether to be at Rocket for years.”
Rocket Companies CEO Varun Krishna will run Redfin until the company finds a permanent new leader. Kelman will remain in an advisory role through April 1.
“Instead, I want to try finding another mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate,” Kelman wrote. “I’m grateful that Rocket has turned out to be such a good owner of Redfin, and that Varun has been such a kind leader.”
Rocket’s acquisition of Redfin in July brought together the nation’s largest mortgage lender with the tech-enabled Seattle-based real estate brokerage. The deal valued Redfin at more than double its market capitalization prior to the acquisition’s public announcement in March 2025.
In an email to staff, obtained by GeekWire, Krishna described Redfin as the “front door to Rocket.”
“We are betting big on Redfin’s future,” he wrote in the memo. “More investment in brand, hiring, traffic growth, and innovation. We will aggressively play to win, with the full strength of Rocket behind this team.”
Krishna added: “Redfin is on the precipice of one of the most exciting transformations in its history, and we’re leaning into it.”
Kelman joined Redfin in 2005, a year after it launched, and helped guide the company from a small Seattle startup into a nationally known real estate brokerage and technology platform. Redfin went public in 2017 in a deal that valued the company at $1.73 billion.
Known for his candid communication style, Kelman frequently spoke publicly about housing affordability, agent compensation, and the structural challenges facing the real estate market. In recent years, he oversaw workforce reductions and cost-cutting measures as higher interest rates slowed home sales and forced real estate tech companies to recalibrate growth expectations.
“Glenn pioneered home search as we know it today and transformed a visionary startup into the Redfin we know today,” Rocket said in a statement to GeekWire. “He built a company that saved thousands of homeowners money and made the American Dream more accessible. We wish Glenn well in his next chapter.”
In his note to employees — titled “Unemployed, In Greenland” — Kelman said he’ll look for a “mission-driven enterprise outside of real estate” for his next opportunity.
He described Redfin as “the only real estate company to take full responsibility for our customers, from click to keys.”
“For most of Redfin’s history, our website expansion was slowed by our brokerage, and our brokerage expansion was slowed by employing our agents,” he wrote. “But standing behind our service was always worthwhile. Now with portals, lenders and brokers racing to stitch together their services, our patient approach has turned out to be the best way to help people all the way home.”
Redfin grew revenue by 7% in 2024 to $1.04 billion, with a net loss of $164.8 million, up from $130 million in 2023. Its stock had fallen more than 30% in the month leading up to the acquisition announcement in March.
Detroit-based Rocket Companies went public in 2020. In addition to mortgage lending products, Rocket also sells personal loans and other fintech offerings. Last year Rocket acquired mortgage lender Mr. Cooper Group in a $9.4 billion stock deal.
Microsoft’s headquarters campus in Redmond. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)
Microsoft’s decision to renew a large swath of office space in Redmond is emerging as a key stabilizing force for the Eastside office market near Seattle.
That’s one takeaway from a new report by commercial real estate firm Broderick Group, which highlighted Microsoft’s renewal for 396,228 square feet at Redmond Town Center, just north of the company’s main headquarters campus. The deal was one of the largest office transactions on the Eastside in 2025.
Microsoft confirmed the new lease when contacted by GeekWire. The tech giant also confirmed a report from the Seattle Times that it is reoccupying space at the Millennium Corporate Park location in Redmond, where it has about 480,000 square feet. The company had previously offered that space for sublease.
While Microsoft was responsible for some of the region’s largest space givebacks last year — including a 750,000-square-foot reduction at The Bravern in Bellevue — the latest commitments suggest the company is holding onto its remaining footprint as it begins enforcing a new return-to-office policy. This past September the company announced that it would implement a three-day in-office requirement, starting across the Seattle region in February before expanding to other U.S. locations and eventually globally.
Both Microsoft and Amazon — and their respective in-office policies — appear to be playing an outsized role in determining how quickly the Eastside’s office recovery takes shape, even as overall vacancy reached 21.8% in the fourth quarter.
Amazon, which last year increased its own in-office policy from three to five days a week, continues building out major projects in Bellevue, including Bellevue 600, The Artise, and West Main. The company employs more than 12,000 people in Bellevue as part of what it calls its “Puget Sound headquarters” which also includes its Seattle campus. Amazon cut 14,000 workers in broad layoffs in October, with 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state.
The light blue bars show vacancy rates growing from 5.8% in 2019 to 2.8% in 2025. (Broderick Group chart)
A growing roster of technology companies has also signed new or expanded leases on the Eastside in recent years, including OpenAI, Snap, Anduril, Shopify, Snowflake, Walmart, and Chewy.
“Notably, a growing number of new-to-market entrants … are choosing the Eastside over Seattle, drawn by Bellevue’s modern office inventory, business friendly climate and skilled technology workforce,” Broderick’s report noted.
Despite the positive signals, the firm cautioned that vacancy is unlikely to fall sharply in the near term. Downtown Bellevue’s vacancy rate stood at 25.4% at the end of the year.
The report also noted that more than 1% of the Eastside’s office inventory has been removed through office-to-residential conversions.
The hybrid and remote work paradigms spawned by COVID, coupled with the severe downsizing of the federal workforce, are resulting in a surfeit of federal office space, both owned and leased. Add the aging of the federal inventory and the growing cost and impact of decades of deferred maintenance, and literally hundreds of government properties nationwide have the potential to be vacated and disposed of. And yet, in the world of federal real estate, there persists the sense that despite all the alignment on the need for action, the federal government is still struggling to effectuate the changes everyone agrees it so desperately needs. A brief survey of the landscape underscores the challenges the government faces as it continues its halting efforts to modernize and right-size its real property portfolio.
The Office of Management and Budget’s Reduce the Footprint and Freeze the Footprint initiatives of 2012 and 2015, respectively, arguably began the process of reigning in government space requirements and were quite successful at the agency level. But the lack of meaningful change in the size of the portfolio led to great congressional disenchantment, particularly with the General Services Administration’s real property disposal program. That led to the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act of 2016, which expedited parts of the disposal process and established the Public Buildings Reform Board to facilitate the identification of properties for disposal. Following COVID, low levels of building utilization further spurred Congress to pass the USE IT Act in 2024, which required agencies to track their space utilization and gave GSA more authority to relocate agencies out of underutilized buildings.
Fast forward to today and there has been meaningful progress. Per USE IT and further direction from OMB, agencies are reporting their utilization data; agencies now are considering sharing space in each other’s buildings; GSA is accelerating the process of preparing buildings for disposal; and GSA now is using commercial real estate brokers, not only to market major properties for disposal, but to actually conduct the sales as well. All of these steps make great sense and represents marked change from past practice.
It seems clear that the structural imbalance between the size of the government’s owned portfolio and the funding available to maintain it now is widely recognized, and the shift of agencies to smaller, leased spaces will continue in earnest. This long-in-the-making alignment between Congress and the administration should be a harbinger of a long overdue, and potentially more rapid, realignment of the federal real estate portfolio.
Unfortunately, the typical headwinds remain. For example, even in the best of times, federal real estate has struggled to gain the attention and focus needed to effect meaningful change. Administrative matters typically take a back seat to program and policy issues, and staffing and funding, both for GSA and the agencies, are more challenging than ever.
But much hard-earned momentum has been built around the needed transformation of the federal real estate portfolio, and there are still opportunities to sustain it. Ideally, GSA, with support from OMB, would work aggressively with agencies to firm up strategic housing plans based on new staffing levels. Centralized funding, perhaps along the lines of a revolving fund paid back by agency rental payments, would enable agencies to conduct the GSA-directed relocations and consolidations necessary to adapt their real estate footprints to their new staffing needs. This would allow for the release of older, inefficient buildings and the acquisition of newer, leased space as necessary. With OMB’s focus and attention (and extensive contract support), GSA could greatly expand use of existing tools like its exchange authority, “administrator’s discretion,” ground leases, negotiated sales and more, to facilitate more private sector-like transactions and trim the portfolio more aggressively.
In this ideal world, GSA would also proactively expand its coordination with local governments, especially in Washington, D.C., to understand the likely future use and zoning of these now-surplus properties. That would enable GSA to address its statutory obligations for historic preservation and environmental mitigation from a “best value” standpoint. From there, GSA could then perform its due diligence to ensure that the sales maximize values while avoiding market saturation and other negative community impacts. With top-down direction, focus and resources, the potential exists to finally get to a leaner and more productive portfolio for government agencies, better outcomes for the communities, and better values for taxpayers.
Adam Bodner is a principal at ABodner Consulting and is vice president of the Federal Real Property Association. The views expressed are his own.
RentSpree CEO and co-founder Michael Lucarelli. (RentSpree Photo)
Michael Lucarelli is looking for Seattle food recommendations — after relocating to the city earlier this year and moving his company with him.
RentSpree, which got its start in Los Angeles but is now headquartered in downtown Seattle, has built a profitable business helping landlords and real estate agents screen tenants, collect rent, sign leases, and manage rentals online.
The company, founded in 2016, serves more than 4 million users and is growing without relying heavily on paid advertising, said Lucarelli, CEO and co-founder of RentSpree.
Lucarelli, a former real estate agent, said Seattle stood out because of its concentration of real estate and proptech companies such as Zillow, Redfin, and Opendoor. The company this month hired former Redfin exec Alex Berezhnyy as chief technology officer, further anchoring its presence in the region, where more than half of the executive team is now based. It has more than 30 employees in Seattle.
“Seattle is really great for talent that balances both an aggressive growth perspective, but also building sustainable companies over time,” Lucarelli said.
RentSpree targets “DIY” landlords, typically individuals who own one to four rental units and still rely on paper applications and manual rent collection. The company’s software helps them manage the entire rental process online, from applications and leases to monthly payments.
While landlords and real estate agents are RentSpree’s core users, the company makes most of its money from renters, who pay application fees and small convenience fees for rent payments. That model has helped fuel its payments business, which is now growing about 150% year-over-year and processing hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
RentSpree also recently launched a banking-as-a-service offering that lets landlords open bank accounts through the platform, earn interest, and track expenses — pushing the company further into fintech territory.
The company’s real advantage is it’s distribution, Lucarelli said. Instead of relying on digital ads, RentSpree partners with MLS systems, Realtor associations, and real estate software platforms to reach landlords where they already work.
More than 10,000 landlords and agents use RentSpree each month. The company has rolled out new AI features to help streamline filling out forms and listing properties.
“We’re focusing on the important jobs that they’re trying to accomplish, or things that they’re doing already — and how we can make it vastly easier by utilizing AI for them,” Lucarelli said.
The company has raised $28 million to date and employs 135 people across the company in the U.S. and Thailand.
A key Google partner is starting to display home listing details directly in search results, prompting some industry experts and analysts to question what impact the feature could have on the traffic — and financials — of major portal players like Zillow, Realtor.com and others.
A ‘controlled experiment’: In some markets, Google’s data partner HouseCanary and its IDX site ComeHome are beginning to experiment with placing home listings at the top of Google search results, complete with basic details, price, images and a “Request a tour” button. According to HouseCanary, the company is licensed in all 50 states and in Washington, D.C., as a full-service brokerage.
Real estate consultant and analyst Mike DelPrete was the first to report on the pilot listing initiative.
HouseCanary offered some insight into the “controlled experiment” via an announcement on LinkedIn this week, suggesting that the company and Google “are innovating” and “pushing into new territory” with the effort.
“Before this test started, we contacted and notified every MLS in the regions included. We are working with those MLSs directly and we have active, ongoing communication with them throughout the test. If an MLS has questions or concerns, we address them directly and promptly,” the announcement reads.
“The goal is simple: improve how consumers discover listings while staying aligned with the rules and expectations of the MLS community. We are excited about what we are building with Google, and we are equally committed to doing it the right way with the MLSs and other stakeholders. We will continue to communicate directly with the MLSs involved and respond quickly to any concerns.”
Impacts of previous search shifts: The move to incorporate home listing information into Google comes over a year after the search giant started integrating AI summaries directly into the top of search results. A July Pew Research Center study found that web users were less likely to click into other pages — such as news media and other outlets that had long depended on traffic as a metric for determining revenue — since Google incorporated AI summaries.
Some major mainstream news sites have seen traffic drop upwards of 30-40% year-over-year partially thanks to AI summaries, NPR reported in July.
What analysts are saying: There may already be concern about what kind of impact home listing summaries on Google pages could have on the top portals. As the leader in home search, Zillow would be the site with the most to lose. At the time of publishing this story, Zillow’s share price has dropped more than 8% since the opening bell on Dec. 15.
But some analysts say the concerns may be exaggerated.
“While we don’t expect a direct near-term impact on Zillow’s business, given that most of Zillow’s traffic is direct (e.g., Zillow.com, StreetEasy.com, mobile apps) and Google’s new product is currently limited to select markets and mobile browsers, we view this development as a long-term risk for real estate portals like Zillow,” Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng wrote in a recent note to clients, CNBC reports.
Piper Sandler called the concerns “overblown,” and analysts with Oppenheimer and Wells Fargo also appeared to be less concerned about immediate impacts on Zillow’s traffic and revenue. Instead, they suggest that the experiment may simply present a new opportunity for Google to generate more revenue.
Wells Fargo analyst Alec Brondolo sees “Zillow, Homes.com, Realtor.com, etc. bidding for home listing ad units rather than Google attempting to monetize directly with an ad product sold to agents,” CNBC reported.
In a blog post, Victor Lund, managing partner of real estate consulting firm WAV Group, highlighted some issues with the pilot and suggested it could overstep existing norms and standards with the IDX protocol.
“IDX was never designed to allow listings to be turned into paid media inventory on global ad networks. If this practice stands, it redefines IDX from a display-based cooperation agreement into an advertising license, something neither MLSs nor brokers have agreed to,” Lund wrote.
Real Estate News has reached out to HouseCanary for more details on the scope and scale of the experiment and to Zillow for comment on the new Google feature.
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