Seattle Luxury Tower Gets Financing as Tech Boom Drives Demand

(Bloomberg) -- Seattle’s grunge culture, fading for years amid a tech-fueled wealth boom, has taken a another blow.

Vancouver-based Westbank Corp. has landed $450 million in construction financing for a planned 47-story downtown tower -- replete with a cantilevered rooftop pool, gardens and apple orchard.

The development, dubbed First Light, is located at 300 Virginia St., in the heart of Seattle’s downtown shopping district, and will have 459 luxury condo units and 115,000 square feet of retail space and offices, according to a statement from Cushman & Wakefield, which arranged the financing.

Seattle has seen some of the fastest home-price increases of any big U.S. metro area in the past few years, as tech titans such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. expand operations. The soaring prices and ritzy developments have drawn public criticism amid a worsening affordability crisis.

But the market has cooled off a bit: The median sale price of condos in Seattle slipped almost 12% in September from a year earlier, according to data from Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

Even so, there’s demand for a luxury development to serve the growing cohort of wealthy buyers in the city’s booming tech industry, according to Cushman’s Dave Karson.

“This is probably one of the first condos in that market that’s really satisfying that demand,” he said. “There’s been so much wealth created in Seattle over the last few years.”

Compared to Vancouver or San Francisco, Seattle is still in its early stages of a condo boom, making it an attractive market for lenders, Karson said.

Part of the demand in Seattle is coming from abroad. Asian investors who propelled Vancouver’s housing sector are now looking at other options after being hit with a series of taxes and regulations. That’s helped push Vancouver developers, from Westbank to Onni Group, to shift residential projects south to Seattle.

The loan for the project was provided by a single lender, the London-based Children’s Investment Fund, which provided “very compelling terms,” according to Cushman.

“We had an overwhelming response for high-leverage financing and ultimately chose a lender that wanted to hold the entire loan,” Karson said.

--With assistance from Noah Buhayar.

To contact the reporter on this story: Natalie Wong in Toronto at nwong133@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Giammona at cgiammona@bloomberg.net, Christine Maurus

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