Tall & Urban News

Online job marketplace Glassdoor plans to hire 500 employees in Chicago over the next few years and has expanded its office in the Fulton Market District to make room for them.

The Bay Area-based tech company today announced it has leased 52,000 square feet (4,831 square meters) at 1375 W. Fulton Street, a new 14-story office building, dubbed West End on Fulton, set to open next year. The two-floor deal doubles its space on the western edge of the trendy neighborhood, where it opened its first Chicago office in 2016 at 1330 W. Fulton Street.

Meanwhile, less than a year after announcing plans to expand its footprint in the Fulton Market District with a big new office, Google is once again searching for another huge swath of space that could make it one of the largest office users downtown. Officials for the Mountain View-based tech giant have been in the market in recent months talking to developers about an expansion that would roughly double its size in the trendy corridor to around 1 million square feet (92,903 square meters), according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

Glassdoor said it will keep its current space, where it houses about 300 employees across its sales, customer service, product and engineering teams. Its new 13-year lease will accommodate a rush of new product and engineering hires it plans in the city.

The deal adds to a long list of tech firms bulking up headcount in Chicago and snapping up new offices. Bay Area-based companies including Google, Facebook and Salesforce have all recently ramped up hiring in Chicago, looking to take advantage of the city’s pool of Midwest engineering talent that is generally more affordable and easier to retain than on the coasts.

Google’s hunt for more room comes just months after it announced a 132,000 square-foot (12,263-square-meter) lease at 210 N. Carpenter Street, a new building by Sterling Bay, developed a couple blocks from the roughly 372,000 square feet (34,560 square meters) Google leases at its 1000 W. Fulton Market primary office. The office portions of both buildings are virtually full, which is why Google is hunting for more space in a new building.

Glassdoor is the first tenant announced at 1375 W. Fulton, a 300,000-square-foot (27,871-square-meter) building at the corner of Fulton and Ogden Avenue that Dallas-based developer Trammell Crow began building late last year on speculation, or without any tenants signed. Glassdoor plans to move in next summer.

The $130 million building, dubbed West End on Fulton, is set to open early next year and will be a bellwether of office demand for the western edge of the neighborhood. Most of the leasing activity in the former meatpacking district-turned-trendy corporate destination has been along the corridor’s eastern end. But new projects are beginning to pop up further west as some developers anticipate the eventual addition of a new Metra station near Ogden that would improve public transportation access to those properties.

“We’re growing incredibly fast in Chicago and are excited to build upon our presence in Chicago’s Fulton Market District,” Glassdoor President and Chief Operating Officer Christian Sutherland-Wong said in a statement. “Chicago has quickly grown into one of Glassdoor’s largest employee bases, in large part due to the region’s impressive talent pool.”

Chicago—like other cities such as New York, Boston, Austin, Texas, and Washington, DC—is seeing a surge in growth from the nation’s biggest tech companies begin to look outside the West Coast stomping grounds for talent. Also, Chicago is now more affordable than Dallas and Houston.

Like Google, Glassdoor started out with sales office but has decided to expand its tech staff in Chicago. Glassdoor founder Robert Hohman mentioned three years ago that the costs of the Bay Area were crimping the company’s growth. It chose Chicago over Austin, primarily for the diversity of its housing and labor markets, and its infrastructure. “We didn’t want to create another place like San Francisco…that would be expensive to live in, especially for people early in their careers,” he said. “I’m worried about that in the Bay Area.”

For more on this story go to Crains Chicago