C&W Has A New Tech Cities List And DC Is No.3 On It

Co-working has helped DC burnish its tech creds. Photo by WeWork

WASHINGTON, DC–Cushman & Wakefield has come out with its first top tech cities list and Washington DC is No. 3, topped only by San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Read C&W Debuts Its Top Tech US Cities List

Asking how this happened is a fair question. Sure, the DC area has been vying for big tech firm leases such as the 100,000-square foot deals that routinely come to market in California, but such efforts never got the traction that local leaders and property owners had hoped.

The answer can be found in C&W’s criteria, which did not focus so much on tech companies’ presence in a city but rather on the “vibe” of the city and other metrics such as local universities’ efforts in advancing technology and the local workforce. It was those factors, not surprisingly, that propelled Washington DC into the upper ranks, Theo Slagle, a C&W director and expert on the tech sector in Washington, DC, tells GlobeSt.com.