Seattle Led Large U.S. Tech Markets in Job Growth From 2016 to 2020

In July 2021, GeekWire reported on a CBRE analysis finding that the Seattle region added more than 48,000 tech jobs from 2016 to 2020. That was growth of more than 35%, the fastest rate of any large U.S. tech market. Of the North American markets in the study, only Toronto and Vancouver, B.C., grew faster, helped in part by restrictive U.S. immigration policy. CBRE confirmed that its Seattle figures cover the whole Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma metro area.

GeekWire tied the growth to Silicon Valley companies expanding their engineering offices in the area, Amazon’s rapid growth, Microsoft’s revival and well-funded local startups, many of them in cloud computing and enterprise software.

In CBRE’s overall scorecard of tech talent markets, Seattle moved past Washington, D.C., into second place behind the San Francisco Bay Area. The report also compared the tech degrees each region’s colleges award with the tech jobs the region added, to see whether a market keeps the talent it produces. Seattle ranked second only to Toronto on that “brain gain” measure.

That talent is expensive. Seattle ranked second to the Bay Area in average tech wages, and third, after the Bay Area and New York, in the total cost of running a tech business. On diversity, measured by tech employment of women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, Seattle fell in the middle of the markets studied.

The article also noted that remote and hybrid work was starting to let some tech workers live farther from company offices. The metro in this study is where Eastlake Real Estate Partners develops apartments, and the firm’s view of the market is on its investors page.

This is our summary. The full article by Todd Bishop appeared in GeekWire on July 13, 2021.