Published March 2004

7E7 may spark need for office, industrial space

Some people have scoffed at how hard local, regional and state government agencies and others have worked to land Boeing’s assembly of its planned 7E7 airliner in Everett — “for only 1,200 jobs.”

But the multiplier effect from the presence of the 7E7 program at Boeing’s Snohomish County plant goes far beyond those 1,200 jobs and far beyond the aerospace sector.

Real estate and construction are two significant sectors that will be greatly affected. How much impact isn’t clear yet. but, after last month’s Lynnwood meeting of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Association, Cushman & Wakefield executive Gary Bullington outlined some of the possibilities for the area’s industrial and office properties.

“The question to be answered before you can talk about economic impact is, ‘What are the nature of the facilities the vendors are going to need?’ We know they will need manufacturing and warehousing buildings, but how big and how many?” he said. Take away the three largest properties on the market — two Boeing buildings in the Bomarc Business Park and one at Goodrich Corp.’s Paine Field site — and the remaining industrial space in south Snohomish County amounts to a vacancy rate of only around 8 percent.

“That’s just about a normal vacancy for industrial areas,” Bullington said. “Since most companies probably won’t want the huge space in those three buildings, they will be looking at the remaining space, and there isn’t that much for the kind of demand we may be expecting from those vendors.”

The good news is that Seaway Center, a master-planned “smart park” in southwest Everett, has land available for around 600,000 square feet of industrial buildings that could be erected quickly — within a matter of months — by Panatonni, a major developer for 37 acres at the site, Bullington said.

He also sees a great potential need for office space for engineering work, as Boeing is asking its major vendors to design and engineer many of the 7E7 component parts.

“Besides vacancies in two buildings in Quadrant I-5 Center in Lynnwood and some other office buildings, there’s a master-planned smart park — Opus Northpointe — just north of Lynnwood that can provide up to 750,000 square feet of office facilities in just a few months,” he said.

One of the key questions though, Bullington said, is whether vendors for the 7E7 will build sections of the plane in other states and ship them to Everett or whether they will want facilities within five to 10 minutes’ driving time of the Boeing plant.

“But it may be that these new tax incentives for Boeing, and also for other aerospace companies, will portray Washington as a much more business-friendly state, friendly enough to attract vendors to locate here,” he said.

Whatever happens, it appears certain there will be land sales, development and building in areas already set aside for industrial and office space, space that will fill with long-term jobs after the short-term construction jobs are gone. Those are just some of the major positive impacts on Snohomish County’s economy expected from the 7E7 program.

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