BELLEVUE – Bellevue’s office rents for Class A office space have grown 11.6 percent over the past year, the highest growth in the nation, according to a study by Seattle-based real estate firm Grubb & Ellis Co. Bellevue’s rent increases in the year ended June 2006 outpaced rent increases in other hot markets such as Richmond, Va., Oakland, Calif., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Why is Bellevue so hot?

“What we’ve seen in Bellevue is a resurgence in the technology industry,” says Nick Papa, Grubb & Ellis’s research analyst in Seattle. “It started in 2004 when Symetra signed for its space and Drugstore.com signed for their space.” Then Eddie Bauer Inc. and Microsoft Corp. took essentially half the available space in the Lincoln Square Tower, which is to be completed next year.

“What makes Bellevue so hot is all the construction, not just of office space but of condominiums and retail,” Papa says. “It’s really developing a downtown urban core.”

The city’s zoning also allows for high-rise office structures such as the 12- and 23-story Bravern buildings and the 26- floor City Center Plaza, both currently under construction. Redmond and Kirkland, Papa says, aren’t set up for the kind of high-density office and retail zoning Bellevue has.

James Keating, senior vice president of Grubb & Ellis, says development is even hotter than it was during the dotcom boom But there is a downside to massive deals like Symetra’s and the rumored Google Inc. deal to lease 75 percent of Tower 333, a 430,000-square-foot office building formerly known as the Bellevue Technology Tower. Keating says that if one of those companies crashes, “then that’s a pretty big hole.”