ChemPoint.com Taking 26,000 SF at One Bellevue Center

BELLEVUE, WA-The chemical marketing company ChemPoint.com has signed a six-year lease for 26,000 sf at One Bellevue Center, a 353,000-sf downtown office property owned by Equity Office Properties that saw several floors vacated last summer when Puget Sound Energy left to anchor Bentall’s new Summit property. The lease, for one-and-a-half floors, reduces vacancy in the building to about 40%.ChemPoint will relocate to the 10th- and 11th floors at One Bellevue Center in November from 11,000 sf in Unico Property’s Delphi Building on the south side of I-90. The company’s new lease rate is not being revealed by the parties involved. The published full-service asking rate is $22.50 per sf per year, but local sources tell GlobeSt.com that ChemPoint’s rate came in well below that mark. ChemPoint’s leasing agent Suzanne Baugh of The Staubach Company tells GlobeSt.com, “EOP gave us a great deal.”Indeed, Baugh says the lease was essentially negotiated six months ago and even though ChemPoint reduced its original commitment for two floors by one-half floor, EOP honored the original negotiations and didn’t look to renegotiate the deal, which likely would have resulted in a higher lease rate, as conditions have improved from the beginning of the year.”We made a bargain and a commitment and just had to stick with it,” says EOP leasing director Don Matt. “It wouldn’t have been right to take advantage of the situation.”Matt says Puget Sound Energy left the building for the Summit property after their former CEO developed brain cancer. “Their new CEO came on board toward the end of the (lease renewal) process and decided it was very important to create a new image,” says Matt. “And part of that was moving to a new building.”There are reportedly several leases under negotiation that would backfill more of the Puget Sound Energy space. Matt declined to provide any specifics until the leases are fully negotiated and signed by both parties. Add in the fact that Safeco’s life and investments business, currently housed on the company’s Redmond campus, is about to take down 280,000 sf of vacant space in EOP’s Rainier Plaza and neighboring Key Center Tower, and Bellevue‘s office availability rate is expected to fall from the mid-teens to the high singe digits in coming months.In addition to a good lease rate, Baugh says ChemPoint chose One Bellevue Center because it is “nice but not opulent” and located in Downtown Bellevue, which provides lots of amenities for employees as opposed to the I-90 corridor, where “you have to get in your car to get a sandwich.”