Nordstrom has signed a letter of intent to rent all but two floors of the empty WaMu tower! Very, very good news for SAM, Regina Hackett reported.
That’s Nordstrom admin, not retail. Nordstrom intends to start occupying the space sometime this year.
Will SAM come out of this whole WaMu debacle even after all?
“We’re not going to know anything specific on the financial side until the details are final and the lease is signed,” says SAM spokeswoman Nicole Griffin. “But it’s a significant light at the end of the tunnel.”
(Evidently Nordstrom sent out a press release about this on December 23 but I somehow missed getting it and am just catching up on reading now.)
That’s wonderful news. Kudos to Nordstrom for showing some civic spirit. In this commercial real-estate market they had lots of other options, I’ll bet.
The “WaMu Tower” is located at 1201 3rd Avenue. The building at 2nd and Union was called the “WaMu Center” until Chase renamed it the “Chase Center”. Maybe the building names were only important to us when we had to figure out which building our next meeting was in, but the story references the wrong building.
I read Regina Hackett’s story 3 times and still cannot decipher it.
Seems I read that Russell Investments is moving up from Tacoma into the WaMu Tower on 3rd by the end of the year.
@4, that’s another “Tower/Center” mixup. The Tower is the pointy one on Third (from which Dan and the Big Tipper used to claim to broadcast their radio program back when most of today’s Slog commenters were still in grade school).
What Russell bought and will move into is the Center (the rectangular building with the entrance on Second, and the Museum on First), or rather that part of the Center not owned by SAM – which is most of it. SAM did great to land Nordstrom for its portion, and Matt Griffin reduced a tiny fraction of his richly earned time in purgatory by brokering the deal.
Is Nordstrom expanding its office holdings, or is it moving out of the space it holds now? Because they occupy most of the tower at 1700 7th Ave. Moving from one office space to another doesn’t help vacancy rates, expanding the holdings does.
(Not sure if a link will show up, but here’s the press release regarding their holdings at 1700: http://about.nordstrom.com/aboutus/pr/08…)
@6, no, it doesn’t help vacancy rates, but it helps SAM, which is a huge bonus. If you like SAM.
Wamu Tower is not the Wamu Center is not the SAM expansion building.
WaMu Tower is the spark plug-looking tower with the Brooklyn at its base just south of Benaroya hall. It was built in the late 80s and is owned by some giant real estate investment firm. At one point it had a bunch of WaMu people in it, but not for a while (well before WaMu went tits up). It’s 90% occupied by law firms (mostly Perkins Coie and David, Wright & Tremaine) . I’m sure it will be renamed something else soon enough – Perkins Coie Tower maybe (they just signed some major lease expansion there).
The WaMu/Chase/Russell Center is just the skinny all glass tower just west of Benaroya Hall. It’s entirely owned by Russell investments now. Russell only has 1000 employees, and the WaMu center can accommodate something like 3000+. I don’t think any other tenants have been announced, but Russell paid so little (like 1/4th the cost to build the thing) I’m sure they’re not desperate to fill the space.
The other building to the west of that is the 16-story SAM expansion building, and it’s actually a separate building, and that’s what Nordstrom is going into (apparently). It doesn’t help that the SAM expansion building looks very similar (glass) and appears connected to the WaMu center on the outside – and that SAM only (ever?) plans to occupy 12 of the 16 floors (why, I cannot say. Anyone know?).
I have friends who worked at WaMu that are still convinced its part of the Wamu Center b/c the top four floors are connected between the two buildings.
At any rate, hopefully this is good for SAM.
@8 Actually, floors 3-12 were all connected. WaMu was leasing those floors back from SAM. The Lear payments were suppsed to pay most of all of SAM’s costs for the expansion. Walls were put up to close off the SAM space on most of the floors.
I used to sit in the SAM space and we all had to move out last March so Chase could break the lease by the FDIC allowed deadline.
I’ve read these comments 3 times and still cannot decipher them.
I love the WaMu Tower. Not as cool as a building like The Gherkin or The Petronas Towers, but a refreshing contrast to the boring skyscrapers around it.
@ we take what we can get here. If its not a beige box and pisses off the old guard enough, I’m happy with it.
what’s wrong with the two floors they don’t want to lease?
This was in The Seattle Times on December 22.