Development deja vu: Selig plans another high-rise project in downtown Seattle
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In February, Martin Selig Real Estate quietly paid $6.5 million for a small Seattle parking garage on Third Avenue across the street from Bed Bath & Beyond.
Selig declined to talk about it until Tuesday, when he said he is paying $7.5 million for the 101-year-old building just south of the garage. His plan: build an office/apartment tower up to 440 feet tall on the property at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Virginia Street.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Selig is in the early stages of developing a similar project one block to the north at Third and Lenora.
Martin Selig, one of the last of Seattle’s independent developers, is on a tear. On Monday, he said his company was the winning bidder of downtown Seattle’s former Federal Reserve Bank branch at 1015 Second Ave. He is rehabbing the historic building, which he acquired for $16 million, into office space.
If those projects weren’t enough, he’s got big office projects planned on Lower Queen Anne and Ballard, and a high-end apartment project by the Olympic Sculpture Park.
“I’m having a good time,” Selig said.
He’s in the early stages of working with the Seattle office of architecture firm Perkins + Will on plans for his newly acquired property across from Bed Bath & Beyond. He thinks the project will have 150,000 square feet on the bottom floors and a yet to-be-determined number of apartments above. The timing of the project has not been determined.
The price that Selig paid for the Third and Virginia land works out to $1,080 a square foot. That’s $211 a foot more than his company paid for the Third and Lenora property. It’s not anywhere near a record, though. In January, a Taiwanese company paid $1,597 a foot for a property at 2011 Fifth Ave.
