Martin Selig escaped Nazi Germany with his family at 3 years old and traveled across Russia to eventually board a steamship bound for San Francisco. It stopped in Seattle unannounced and the Seligs decided to stay.
Selig opened his first shopping center in 1962 and by the 1980s, the firm owned more than a third of all office inventory in Seattle. He now owns over 4M SF of office space in the city. He developed the 76-story Columbia Center, the tallest building in Washington State by a large margin when it opened in 1985. Selig sold the building for $354M in 1989.
Selig’s company will help to bring WeWork’s WeLive co-living concept to the West Coast in a 36-story mixed-use development in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. His daughter, Jordan Selig, is the managing director for Martin Selig Real Estate. — Scott Klocksin
