Online retailer Amazon is looking at shedding some work space around the country while simultaneously expanding in a fast-growing West Coast city near its headquarters, the latest sign of the uncertainty facing office owners throughout the United States.

The company is looking to slash unused offices across its real estate portfolio, joining other corporations in trying to make calibrations in their property use to catch up with shifts in remote and hybrid work as a result of the pandemic.

The e-commerce giant is targeting savings by letting some leases expire and terminating others to trim its inventory of empty offices in a move that Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said will continue for some time.

The company, he said, is now "constantly evaluating our real estate portfolio based on the dynamic and diverse needs of Amazon’s businesses by looking at trends in how employees are using our offices.” His comments came after an internal memo obtained by media outlets including Business Insider said Amazon expects to reduce its current office vacancy rate of nearly 34% to 10% over the next three to five years to try to save about $1.3 billion in annual operating expenses.

While Amazon declined to discuss specifics in those reports, the company told CoStar News it has been moving thousands of employees from Seattle and other offices to several properties in nearby Bellevue, Washington, since last fall, as it has decided not to renew leases near its headquarters.

“In some cases, employees may move buildings to increase collaboration and drive better utilization of our workspaces," Glasser said. "In other cases, we may take on additional space where we’re currently limited, or make adjustments where we have excess capacity.”

The move by Amazon reflects an effort by U.S. businesses to find other companies to sublease some underused space. The national office vacancy rate, fueled by companies offloading record amounts of sublease space and responding to the effects of remote work, has climbed to nearly 14%, according to CoStar data.

Amazon occupies millions of square feet of office space around the world, including at its corporate headquarters, as well as its second headquarters in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., and operations headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee.

The latest move to reduce its vacant office space reflects the view of some analysts that the U.S. office market hasn’t yet reached the bottom, but is getting closer to seeing it, said Phil Mobley, CoStar Group's national director of market analytics.

“This fits my general view that the adjustment in office demand is still ongoing, but that the more actions like this that we see from major occupiers, the closer we get to being able to envision where it will settle out,” Mobley said. “Given that nearly half of pre-2020 leases have yet to reach expiration, we expect more of the shakeout to occur over the next couple of years.”

Tenants collectively handed back upward of 65 million square feet last year, boosting the total to more than 180 million square feet of move-outs since the start of 2020.

Amazon hasn’t been immune. The company shed hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space last year as it cut costs and laid off workers. In January, the firm said it was eliminating hundreds of jobs in its streaming and theatrical film operations, adding to the more than 25,000 layoffs it's had over the past two years as the company reduced its office footprint and canceled or postponed expansion projects across the United States.

The company said it wouldn’t renew its leases for space in towers near its corporate headquarters in downtown Seattle, including more than 200,000 square feet at 1800 Ninth and more than 400,000 square feet at West 8th in Denny Triangle.

In Bellevue, however, Amazon has begun moving into the 555 Tower and West Main tower at Vulcan Real Estate's three-building, 1.03 million-square-foot office campus that recently completed construction across Lake Washington from its Seattle headquarters.

Amazon's plans to shed vacant space at unspecified locations adds to the pain of a commercial real estate market that is already suffering from decreased office demand linked to the remote-work boom and retrenchment by big companies such as Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet and Facebook parent company Meta.

The companies have offloaded office real estate since the beginning of last year in a variety of ways as they make good on plans to remain profitable.

Microsoft, for instance, plans to vacate a combined total of 2.7 million square feet in greater Seattle's downtown Bellevue and the Interstate 90 corridor. The company is moving many operations to its headquarters in nearby Redmond, where it's completing a major expansion project.

Mountain View, California-based Alphabet recently listed two office buildings it has leased for nearly a decade in San Jose, California, according to marketing materials viewed by CoStar.

Amazon's Glasser said Amazon’s office reductions are unrelated to the company’s return-to-work policy. The company last May began requiring employees to work at a company office at least three days a week.

“The changes we've already made are improving vacancy rates, and we expect to see further progress as we continue to learn and iterate on our portfolio," Glasser said.