Following a recent visit to Seattle, May Lee, a reporter with CGTN and a US-based affiliate of China’s CCTV, reported on the city’s tremendous growth rate, highlighting that big businesses are fueling the upward trend. Lee met with local market leaders to explore the latest activity in Seattle in a tour that included conversations with city leaders and a presentation by Terry Bendrick, Vice President of Burrard Group, at the NEXUS Sales Center.
As Lee describes, there are 24,000 Amazon employees in downtown Seattle alone, and these, along with other tech giants including Google, Facebook and a number of biotech companies, are bringing new residents to the city in need of housing. Though there is currently over $5 billion in new construction activity in Seattle right now, a figure up 40% year-over-year, “there’s still an incredible shortage of housing,” Lee writes. “Rent has gone up nearly 60 percent in the last six years and is expected to keep climbing.”
Robert Pong, Terry Bendrick, and May Lee discuss the tech effect at the NEXUS Sales Center during her visit to Seattle.
As in-city residents experience rising rents, experts forecast dim days ahead for new condominium inventory with rising prices and anemic inventory. The limited supply in Seattle will be supplemented by few new construction condominium opportunities delivering in the Emerald City over the next few years, though many of the units are already pre-sold. Burrard Group’s NEXUS Condominium Tower, for instance, is already over 83% pre-sold despite occupancy scheduled for mid-2019.