In all, the company will occupy about 870,000 square feet across three buildings in the South Lake Union neighborhood.
For the third time in the past year, Facebook has launched a significant expansion in Seattle, making it one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the region.
The social networking giant said on Friday it has signed a lease for all 150,000 square feet of office space at the new 1101 Westlake building in South Lake Union. The six-story building just opened a year ago and features nice views of Lake Union and modern interior designs.
It’s right across the street from a larger office on Dexter Avenue North that Facebook moved into last spring. And it’s less than a mile up the road from the big Arbor Blocks complex that Facebook signed a lease for just last month.
The latest lease is the smallest of the three offices Facebook will eventually take over. In all, the company will occupy 870,000 square feet in the neighborhood. That’s enough to hold roughly 5,000 employees.
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The Silicon Valley company only has about 1,000 engineers, programmers and other staffers here now but has said it sees Seattle as a major focus for its expansion. Facebook picked Seattle for its first satellite engineering office in 2010, and the region remains its largest engineering outpost outside the Bay Area.
The two neighboring Facebook offices on Westlake and Dexter are already open. The largest one, along 8th Avenue and Harrison Street, is under construction now and won’t open until the third quarter of 2018.
Facebook declined to comment beyond confirming the lease.
South Lake Union is still dominated by Amazon, which is on pace to have about 12 million square feet in the neighborhood in the coming years.
But other tech companies are increasingly moving in. In the next few months, crews are set to begin work on a new 600,000-square-foot project a block south of Lake Union that Google will take over, likely in early 2019, a few blocks from the new Facebook office.
Facebook’s landlord at its newest office will be Invesco, an Atlanta-based global investment firm that bought the 1101 Westlake building for $67.4 million in 2015. The Broderick Group, a commercial real estate firm that first disclosed the Facebook lease at 1101 Westlake in a report Friday, says the deal was the seventh largest individual lease signed in Seattle in the past year.