Expedia Building

The Expedia Building is a 20-story office building in the central business district of Bellevue, Washington. The building houses the corporate office of Expedia, Inc., which moved there at the end of 2008.HistoryIn October 1997, local developer Eugene Horbach proposed the design of the Bellevue Technology Tower as a 19-story building with 350000sqft of space. The project was one of several in Bellevue accompanying the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.Ambitious plans and the collapse of the dot-com bubble led to severe financial difficulties and delays. In June 2002, Horbach's development partnership defaulted on $22 million in loans. Union pension funds that financed the tower took over ownership of the site. To save the property from foreclosure in September 2002, Horbach sold a 10acre development site he had spent 17 years acquiring. Then Horbach died on January 1, 2004.With the excavation and part of the underground parking garage already complete, the Seattle office of real estate company Hines and Washington Capital Management announced revised plans for the site in March 2006. The city discussed the possibility of mandating construction projects to be completed once commenced due to the delays.In August 2006, it was rumored that Google would be leasing most of the building's office space. The building was scheduled for completion in October 2007, but was delayed when a fixed tower crane at the site collapsed in November 2006, killing one person in a neighboring apartment building. In June 2007, Expedia announced that it would lease 16 floors of the building.