Boeing has signed one of the biggest industrial leases of the past two years in the Seattle area, taking more than 1 million square feet at a just-completed building near the Port of Tacoma.

The aircraft giant signed a deal for a 1.03 million-square-foot warehouse built by Bridge Industrial at the Chicago-based developer's Bridge Point i5 business park in Milton, 28 miles south of Seattle and six miles east of the busy Port of Tacoma, according to people familiar with the transaction.

The deal is one of the top industrial leases in the United States ranked by square footage this year and is the largest deal in the greater Seattle area since 2022, CoStar data shows.

The move comes as Boeing, greater Seattle's biggest occupier of manufacturing and warehouse space — and still one of Washington's largest employers, more than two decades after moving its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago — has continued to be one of the Puget Sound region's most active industrial tenants.

Boeing kept adding to its industrial holdings in the year prior to the highly publicized blowout of a door plug in a Boeing-made 737 Max shortly after a Jan. 5 takeoff from Portland International Airport.

The company slowed aircraft production in the wake of the January incident as it focused on strengthening its safety and quality management systems. The incident caused only a few minor injuries but forced Alaska Airlines to briefly ground its fleet, and also resulted in production delays during an investigation by Boeing and federal authorities.

The investigation led Boeing "to take multiple additional steps to improve the stability of our operation, including major elements of our supply chain,” CEO David Calhoun told analysts during the company's most recent earnings call on July 31.

Progress on the safety goals has allowed Boeing to expand aircraft production again, including the 737 program, which delivered 70 planes in the second quarter of this year, including 35 in June, Chief Financial Officer Brian West told analysts in the conference call.

Boeing reactivated the third production line at its Renton factory, where the company completed 25 planes each in June and July, up from monthly totals in the high-single-digit range at the end of March, West said. The company expects to keep ramping up production in Renton in the second half of the year, he added.

Boeing moved its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, in May 2022, and also has major Washington facilities in Everett, Auburn and Frederickson.

The company did not respond to requests for comment on details about the Bridge Point i5 lease, including the type of operations the company is planning in Milton.

The latest Boeing lease reduces the overall availability rate of space in the Milton-Auburn industrial submarket to 7% from 14%, with virtually no availability for buildings over 500,000 square feet, said Elliott Krivenko, director of market analytics for CoStar in Seattle.

“Large-box sizes have had an outsized impact on vacancies and availability in the region over the past couple of years, but this lease illustrates the impact that one major lease can have on these figures,” said Krivenko. “Not only is this the largest lease signed in nearly two years in the Puget Sound region, it also removes the area's largest space availability.”

The company signed several leases across the region last year, including one for more than 845,000 square feet at Logistics Property Co.'s new Frederickson One.

Boeing last year also signed for about 415,000 square feet at CenterPoint’s CenterPoint Seattle in Tukwila. Other leases signed by Boeing last year include several buildings in Kent, south of Seattle.

The manufacturer leased two buildings totaling 315,000 square feet at the Logisticenter at Pacific Gateway, and 390,000 square feet in the Olympic Steamship Building, both owned by Dermody Properties.