The owner of the empty 635 Elliott building on Seattle’s waterfront has applied to do interior work throughout the building. Amazon is the rumored tenant.

The commercial real estate market has been buzzing for months with rumors that Amazon.com would lease office space in three downtown Seattle buildings. Now city permitting records indicate those rumors are true.

If they are, Amazon will be taking down around an additional 515,000 square feet of space. This would boost the company’s footprint to around 8 million square feet of space in Seattle  when counting what the company owns and leases, what Vulcan Inc.  has under construction for Amazon and what Amazon is building or plans to build on its own.

Shorenstein Properties, the owner of the 15-story Blanchard Plaza building at 2201 Sixth Ave., already has received a building permit to do work on floors two through 15 of the two-tower property. That adds up to around 228,000 square feet of space. Listed as the contractor on the permit application is the Seattle office of IA/Interior Architects, which does work for Amazon.

IA Managing Principal Jeff Miller would neither confirm nor deny that the tenant is Amazon. Jean Rainier of Shorenstein referred questions to officials of Urbis Partners, the Seattle commercial real estate company that markets space at Blanchard Plaza for lease. Representatives of Urbis and Amazon did not respond to calls for comment.

A block away, at 2301 Fifth Ave., is a six-story office building called Fifth & Bell, where, according to city records, IA/Interior Architects applied to do alterations on floors one through three. Information on the website of Hines, which owns the building, indicates there are around 100,000 square feet of space on those floors. Hines officials did not respond to calls.

Fifth & Bell and Blanchard Plaza are next to where Amazon is building a three-block campus.

The third building where Amazon  has been rumored to be taking space is the empty four-story, 187,000-square-foot 635 Elliott building on Seattle’s waterfront. The owner of that property, Martin Selig Real Estate, earlier this month applied to do tenant improvement work on all four floors. Martin Selig declined to name the tenant. “I never talk about any clients I’m working with,” he said.

Marc Stiles Staff Writer-Puget Sound Business Journal