Zillow Group will pay $212.5 million to settle a shareholder class action lawsuit over its handling of Zillow Offers, the home-flipping business it shut down in 2021.

The lawsuit alleged that Zillow executives painted an overly positive picture of Zillow Offers in the months before the shutdown, without disclosing how poorly the company was able to predict home prices. That kept the stock artificially high until Zillow revealed the problems and announced the shutdown in November 2021, according to the complaint.

The Seattle-based company disclosed the settlement Wednesday in an SEC filing. About $48 million of the payment is expected to come from insurance. The deal requires court approval and includes no admission of wrongdoing.

In a statement, a Zillow spokesperson said, “We are pleased that the parties have reached a resolution on the matter.”

The settlement comes about three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Zillow’s challenge to the case’s class status. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups backed Zillow’s petition.

Steve Berman, managing partner of Seattle law firm Hagens Berman, the court-appointed class counsel, told Real Estate News he believes it’s the largest single securities settlement in the history of the Western District of Washington, the federal court district that includes Seattle.

Separate shareholder lawsuits filed on the company’s behalf against its leaders, known as derivative suits, remain pending, according to the filing.

Zillow bet its future on buying and selling homes in 2019, when co-founder Rich Barton returned as CEO and projected the business would reach $20 billion in annual revenue within three to five years. The company used its pricing algorithms to buy houses, fix them up and resell them.

The effort unraveled in the fall of 2021. An analyst report found that two-thirds of 650 homes it sampled from Zillow’s inventory were listed for less than the company paid.

Days later, Zillow shut down the business, cut about 2,000 jobs and took a $304 million inventory writedown, with Barton citing the unpredictability of its home-price forecasts. Zillow’s stock fell 32% over two days, according to Reuters.

The original lawsuit, filed that month in federal court in Seattle, cited upbeat statements executives made in the months before the shutdown.

They included a September 2021 remark by Jeremy Wacksman, then Zillow’s chief operating officer and now its CEO, that “the strength and the appeal for Zillow Offers just continues to grow.” Investor Jeremy Jaeger later became the lead plaintiff.

The class covers investors who bought Zillow Class A or Class C shares between Aug. 5 and Nov. 2, 2021. If the judge grants preliminary approval, Zillow will pay the money into a settlement fund within 20 business days.

Blue Origin is taking over an industrial building in Des Moines, Wash., where the Jeff Bezos-founded space company plans a mix of lab, development and light production work, the company confirmed to GeekWire.

The 265,922-square-foot facility, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was previously a Bartell Drugs distribution center just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Blue Origin said that at full capacity over the long term, the site is expected to support hundreds of employees.

KING 5 first reported the news Tuesday, citing a state environmental application filed in September that lists Blue Origin Manufacturing LLC at the building’s address, 21202 24th Ave. S. A pre-application under review by the city indicates the property could be used for research and development of commercial satellites, the station reported.

Commercial real estate firm Newmark announced a lease for the entire building last week without naming the tenant.

“The manufacturing project that will be using this property is cutting-edge and we are excited about the job growth and possibilities that it represents for our region,” Newmark Executive Vice Chairman Thad Mallory said in a news release.

With roughly 33,000 residents, the small city of Des Moines is becoming something of an aerospace hub.

Blue Origin’s new location is around the corner from where Shield AI is building X-Forge 3, a 420,000-square-foot facility that will make the company’s X-BAT autonomous fighter jet. Shield AI said last month it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s, and that it’s looking for another 1 million square feet.

“It’s all about labor and access to power,” Mallory told KING 5, referring to the advanced manufacturing projects coming to the area.

Blue Origin is headquartered in nearby Kent, Wash., about 5 miles from the Des Moines site.

The company is working to get its New Glenn rocket flying again after one exploded during a ground engine test in May, which damaged its Florida launch pad. New Glenn is slated to carry Blue’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a test in Earth orbit planned for mid-2027 ahead of a crewed moon landing targeted for 2028.

AI infrastructure startup Nscale is doubling down on its new Seattle-area presence before even opening the doors.

After initially leasing a single floor at The Eight tower in downtown Bellevue earlier this year, the London-based company has expanded by an additional floor, bringing its total footprint in the new development to approximately 46,000 rentable square feet, according to a report from The Broderick Group.

The expansion signals an aggressive ramp-up for Nscale’s primary U.S. engineering hub, slated to open in January 2027. While the initial 24,000-square-foot lease was pegged to accommodate up to 250 employees, the added space gives the fast-growing cloud provider room to scale its local team even further beyond its current 50 Seattle-area workers.

Founded in 2024, Nscale is riding a massive wave of capital and growth.

It raised a $2 billion Series C round at a $14.6 billion valuation earlier this year, backed by Nvidia, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, and Point72, alongside a $900 million credit line.

The company also earlier this year hired Nidhi Chappell, the former Microsoft corporate vice president who led Azure AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, including the supercomputers that power ChatGPT. As Nscale’s new president of AI infrastructure, based in the Seattle area, Chappell will oversee the company’s global engineering and data center operations.

“I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in AI over the past several years, but one thing has always stood out: the world remembers the breakthroughs, but it’s the people building the infrastructure behind the scenes who make them possible,” Chappell wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year announcing the company’s first “onboarding” event in Seattle.

Nscale’s new office is set to open in January, with the second floor slated to open in June, reports The Puget Sound Business Journal.

The company’s growth underscores Bellevue’s growing magnetism for out-of-town AI players. The company joins a dense ecosystem of AI infrastructure and application hubs establishing outposts on the Eastside, including xAI, OpenAI, Databricks, CoreWeave, Armada, and Anduril.

Superhuman, the San Francisco company formerly known as Grammarly, opened a 13,501-square-foot office in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood on Tuesday, moving out of a coworking space and giving itself room to hire.

The office, at 1000 Dexter Ave. N., is opening with 50 workstations and can hold up to 80, a Superhuman representative told GeekWire via email.

Superhuman plans to keep hiring in Seattle for data engineering, data governance and data science roles. Its careers page lists 12 open positions that can be based in Seattle, including software engineering, site reliability and product management jobs.

The company joins a growing list of out-of-town AI companies expanding in the region in search of technical talent, including OpenAI in Bellevue and Anthropic in Seattle.

Grammarly acquired the Superhuman email app in July 2025 and renamed the whole company after it that October. Its CEO is Shishir Mehrotra, a former Microsoft and YouTube executive who co-founded the collaborative documents startup Coda.

The company’s suite of AI tools for work includes the Superhuman Go assistant, Mail, Docs and the Grammarly writing assistant. It has been expanding the lineup in part through acquisitions, announcing deals this year for AI detection startup GPTZero and meeting notetaker Fathom.

According to the company, the Seattle office is set up for hybrid work under a program called “Ways of Working,” which replaced a return-to-office mandate in January. U.S. employees choose two to five days a week in the office and get a quarterly wellness stipend ranging from $500 to as much as $2,000 depending on how often they come in, Entrepreneur reported.

We’ve asked the company for more information, including how many people it employs in Seattle and who leads the office.

UPDATE: A spokesperson for Superhuman said that they have about 96 hub-based employees today in Seattle, with about 10 more roles planned this year in areas such as data engineering, data governance engineering and data science roles. The Seattle office is led by Hari Sivaramakrishnan, director of engineering at Superhuman. The company employs 1,700 globally.

“Seattle is one of the deepest tech-talent markets in the country and a key Pacific Northwest hub, making it a strategic presence for Superhuman as we continue to hire and build out our AI productivity suite,” the company said in a statement. The new office marks a long-term investment in the region, moving beyond a coworking arrangement into a dedicated home.”

Seattle’s tax collections have nearly tripled over the past decade, soaring from $900 million in 2013 to a projected $2.8 billion in 2026. But who pays those taxes, and how the tax revenue is collected, looks vastly different today than a decade ago.

A new report released by ECOnorthwest, commissioned jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, show city tax revenues far outstripping population and job growth, driven by targeted corporate taxes on a small pool of major employers.

Between 2013 and 2025, Seattle’s tax revenues jumped 172%, outpacing population growth (31%), job growth (23%), and local inflation (50%). During that period, real tax growth grew 5.6 times faster than population and 7.5 times faster than employment.

The findings come as city leaders, major tech employers and regional business groups grapple with shifting post-pandemic work patterns and a political climate that has frequently placed large technology companies like Amazon in its sights.

According to the report, broad-based core taxes, such as property, sales, utility, and general Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes, comprised 83% of city tax collections in 2013. By 2026, those core broad taxes are projected to drop to just 52% of the total revenue.

Replacing them are narrow, targeted tax levies:

• The JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax (2021): Paid by fewer than 500 companies, with the top 10 taxpayers footing 73% of the total bill.
• The Social Housing Tax (2025): Paid by roughly 220 entities, with its top 10 taxpayers covering 66%.

Combined, two taxes that did not exist five years ago now account for nearly a third of all business tax dollars collected by the city. Overlap among top taxpayers means fewer than 20 companies account for roughly $356 million in annual City of Seattle revenue.

“Seattle’s tax collections are growing far faster than its population, jobs or inflation. Employers are carrying more of that burden. That trajectory is not sustainable,” said Seattle Metro Chamber president & CEO Joe Nguyen. “The question cannot always be how to collect more money. It must be how to deliver better results with the money we already have and build a tax structure that helps our economy grow.”

The heavy pivot to business revenue coincides with divergent employment trends between Seattle and its neighboring Eastside hubs.

Between March 2020 and March 2025, Seattle lost approximately 24,000 jobs, while the remainder of King County added 21,000. The report notes that Seattle lost 18,000 jobs in the single year leading up to March 2025 alone. And that figure that does not yet capture the full impact of major remote work policies and tech layoffs announced across the region.

The report arrives on the heels of previous GeekWire coverage tracking regional tech dynamics, including the shift of high tech jobs from Seattle to Bellevue, as well as broader political shifts in how West Coast hubs are responding to tech sector backlash and the AI boom.

However, in a sign that Mayor Katie Wilson is paying close attention to tech-sector headwinds and shifting job patterns, she proposed a $9.1 billion 2027 budget that would erase a $175 million general fund deficit and cut nearly $50 million in spending while freezing JumpStart tax rates.

Outreach confirmed plans to move its headquarters from Interbay to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood early next year, joining a campus that Adobe has anchored since the late 1990s.

The sales technology company, which was valued at more than $4.4 billion in a 2021 funding round, has grown to about 800 employees from 680 in late 2024.

The company will take one floor at Fremont Lake Union Center, a three-building, roughly 424,000-square-foot campus on North 34th Street owned by Kilroy Realty. Outreach’s new space is at 701 N. 34th St., a four-story building next door to Adobe’s longtime Seattle office.

Outreach CEO Abhijit Mitra disclosed the move to the Puget Sound Business Journal, saying it would bring more face-to-face collaboration. Outreach confirmed the plans to GeekWire. The company is currently based at 333 Elliott in Interbay, where it leased the top three floors of the Martin Selig Real Estate building in 2018. It has since cut back to two floors, the PSBJ reports.

The move will bring Outreach back to Fremont. Before 333 Elliott, the company occupied about 26,000 square feet in the neighborhood, subleased from Tableau, GeekWire reported at the time.

Adobe, which established its Seattle presence by acquiring PageMaker maker Aldus in 1994, moved to the Fremont campus from Pioneer Square in 1998, becoming the anchor tenant of what was then called Quadrant Lake Union Center.

Adobe renewed and extended its lease on 163,000 square feet in 2018. The campus has seen other changes more recently: Salesforce-owned Tableau left the 837 N. 34th St. building in 2024, and co-working company Kiln is preparing to open its first Washington location in the building, with doors set to open late this year.

Tableau remains in the neighborhood. The Salesforce unit renewed its lease in July on roughly 114,000 square feet at its Data 1 building, 744 N. 34th St.

Google plans to eventually leave its longtime Fremont offices and is in the process of consolidating its Seattle employees in South Lake Union, GeekWire reported last year.

Founded in 2014, Outreach makes AI tools that research prospects, take notes during sales meetings, coach reps in real time and update CRM systems. Its customers include Zoom, Siemens and Snowflake. Co-founder Manny Medina stepped down as CEO in 2024, and Mitra, who joined in 2023 as president of product and technology, took over.

Goldman Sachs is expanding its technology presence in the Seattle region, opening a new Bellevue engineering center that will accommodate more than 125 employees focused on artificial intelligence and cloud transformation.

The New York-based financial giant held a ribbon-cutting ceremony this month for the new office, its first dedicated space for engineers in the Pacific Northwest.

The Bellevue location adds to Goldman Sachs’ existing presence in downtown Seattle, where the company has maintained an office since 2001 for its banking and wealth management divisions.

“We are in a period of rapid technological change, but we know our people are still this firm’s greatest asset,” Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon said in a statement. “Hiring exceptional talent is central to how we adapt and grow.”

The move also puts Goldman Sachs in the company of a growing list of financial and technology companies that have established engineering operations in the Seattle area. GeekWire maintains a list of nearly 150 engineering hubs in the Seattle region here.

JPMorgan Chase established its Seattle Tech Center in 2018 and has steadily expanded it. The engineering hub has grown to about 400 employees and is now anchoring a new AI infrastructure team focused on controlling how the bank runs AI across its own data centers and outside cloud providers.

Goldman Sachs said its new Bellevue location comes amid growth at other facilities in Dallas, Salt Lake City and Warsaw. Earlier this month, the company hired Dinesh Keswani — a former Microsoft and GoDaddy engineering leader — to co-lead its core engineering team alongside Gopi Parameswaran. Keswani will also serve as chief technology officer of The Core Engineering.