A piece of Amazon history is back on the market.
The Bellevue home where Jeff Bezos started the company went up for sale Thursday at $2.28 million, offering the chance to own “the birthplace of Amazon.”
Bezos rented the home and started his online book seller in the home’s garage in 1994. In the three decades since, the company has grown into a global brand, one of the country’s largest employers and a lightning rod for debates about income inequality and competition.
In a nod to Amazon’s early beginnings, the team listing the home for sale recreated the company’s original blue and white sign reading “amazon.com” to display in the garage. An open house over the weekend drew a mix of curious onlookers and sincere home shoppers, said listing agent Lin Shen, with Sea to Sky Realty.
According to company lore, Amazon began in the garage with desks made from doors purchased from Home Depot, a style of desk that persists at the company as “a symbol of frugality, one of Amazon’s core values.”
But the garage headquarters were short-lived. Amazon spent just a few months in the garage before the company moved to an office in Sodo, and Bezos and his then-wife MacKenzie Scott moved to Belltown, according to The Everything Store, a 2013 book that details the company’s rise.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2011 that Bezos chose the Bellevue home in part because it included the garage — which had been converted into a rec room — “so that he could boast of having a garage startup like Silicon Valley legends from Hewlett-Packard on.”
The home today likely doesn’t look much like it did when Bezos and Scott reportedly rented the home for $890 a month. In 2001, previous owners “meticulously rebuilt” the three-bedroom home, according to the listing. The home now includes “an enormous great room, fabulous granite [and] maple kitchen, with natural light from skylights, creating a bright and inviting atmosphere.” The listing was first reported by the Daily Mail.
The last time the home was listed in 2019, the listing agent at the time told The Seattle Times the garage itself also likely did not look like it did when Bezos got his start there.
The home, built in 1954, sold in 2019 for about $1.5 million.
The current owners live in California and have rented out the house for the last two to three years, Shen said. He expects the home could draw five or more offers in the next few weeks as the sluggish local housing market picks up a bit.
Shen said he didn’t factor the Amazon history into the listing price, instead focusing on comparable nearby homes. The home sits in King County’s priciest area, Bellevue west of I-405 (which also includes high-end neighborhoods like Medina, Yarrow Point and Hunts Point), where the median home sold for nearly $3 million in December.
Since the house hit the market for sale, one potential buyer mentioned that he works with Amazon suppliers and could “invite them over to see this,” Shen said. Others, Shen said, just like the house.
This story includes material from the Seattle Times archives.
