Amazon is poised to nearly double its space in a Midtown Manhattan office tower as part of a coworking partnership with WeWork, an agreement that has allowed the tech giant to quickly and flexibly stretch its office footprint nationally.
The Seattle-based company is tacking on another 259,000 square feet at 1440 Broadway. The new Manhattan deal means the company will ultimately grow to occupy about 560,000 square feet in the CIM Group-owned property, according to two people familiar with the agreement.
WeWork has supported Amazon’s real estate strategy in key markets including New York City, “where we’ve partnered on three significant transactions over the past year,” a WeWork spokesperson said in a statement to CoStar News. These deals allow Amazon “to manage its footprint efficiently, flexibly and at scale, whether through existing WeWork locations or newly sourced offices.”
The agreement, first reported by Bloomberg, is similar to others Amazon has made with WeWork for offices elsewhere in New York City, as well as in San Francisco, Dallas and Nashville, Tennessee. The coworking company signs on for space that it operates on Amazon’s behalf, an arrangement that makes it possible for companies to quickly expand their real estate holdings while keeping some level of flexibility to accommodate future changes.
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to CoStar News’ requests to provide a comment or additional details about the 1440 Broadway deal.
The company has long been an enterprise tenant at the 25-story tower, one of WeWork’s largest locations in the city. Amazon renewed its original block of space in the nearly 740,400-square-foot building about two years ago as part of a string of deals the company signed to solidify its Manhattan office footprint.
A company spokesperson said at the time that flexible workspace was a critical component of Amazon’s real estate strategy, a sentiment that has only strengthened alongside the company’s growth and push to get its workers back to physical office space.
With the additional space, Amazon will be the building’s largest tenant.
On a streak
Amazon and WeWork’s latest arrangement closely follows similar deals the two have made within the past year.
Earlier this summer, the retail and tech behemoth added 141,000 square feet to its Silicon Valley footprint as well as an entire floor in the Watermark building in Tempe, Arizona. The WeWork deals underscore the company’s broader real estate plans as it scrambles to house all of its corporate employees in the aftermath of its return-to-office mandate.
Amazon’s rapid growth has also fueled WeWork’s own expansion as it tries to keep up with one of its largest clients.
WeWork signed one of Manhattan’s largest office leases of 2024 when it took about 304,000 square feet in December at 330 W. 34th St. on Amazon’s behalf. Several weeks later, the coworking company signed a deal for a 217,000-square-foot building in Mountain View, California, also for Amazon to fill and expand its regional office portfolio.
Amazon last year unveiled plans to ditch its pandemic-era flexibility with a new mandate that, for many workers, took effect Jan. 2. However, Amazon had to postpone that date for some of its workers after realizing it didn’t have enough office space to adequately house everyone full time.
The company paid $456 million in May to acquire the nearly 641,000-square-foot building at 522 Fifth Ave., near some of its other Manhattan hubs. The deal marked Amazon’s first office purchase since 2020 and closed within weeks of its 330,000-square-foot lease at 10 Bryant Park, one of New York City’s largest leases so far this year.
Amazon also signed one of the largest office leases in Miami’s Wynwood area with a deal in January to take more than 50,000 square feet in the Wynwood Plaza building. The company had been searching for its own South Florida office outpost for about a year after occupying space in a WeWork location in Coral Gables.
Within months of signing that lease, Amazon expanded to about 75,500 square feet at the mixed-use project.
For Amazon, all of that growth is seen as critical to bolstering its corporate culture and improving productivity, according to statements CEO Andy Jassy made during the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit earlier this year.
“We’re in meetings together, we’re iterating with one another,” Jassy said. “People riff on top of each other’s ideas better if they’re together.”