RESTON, VA-Two recently inked leases in the outer suburbs of Northern Virginia--Reston and Herndon--are providing some anecdotal evidence that the DC area’s outer suburbs are starting to come back to life. 

One deal is a 30,000-square-foot lease inked by Penzance with NetWitness at the Parkridge Center Four, which is a six-story, 120,000-square-foot, class A office building just off the Dulles Toll Road at the corner of Hunter Mill Road and Sunrise Valley Drive in the Parkridge Center office park here. The building is owned and managed by Penzance Management and is currently 85% leased. Other tenants include Qwest, ScienceLogic, Avenity, GS5 and Logostech. Andy Klaff, Jake McInerney and John Dettleff of Grubb & Ellis represented Penzance, and Harry Klaff and Matt Coursen of Jones Lang LaSalle represented NetWitness.  

The other transactions were inked in Herndon recently by Brandywine Realty Trust and Deltek Systems and CA. These totaled 227,962 square feet at the REIT’s office building at 2291 Wood Oak Dr. Deltek currently leases space in three Brandywine properties, but is relocating to 2291 Wood Oak under the roughly 10-year lease in order to accommodate the company’s growth. Deltek will occupy 157,911 square feet in the fourth quarter of 2011. CA, for its part, has renewed a 10.5-year lease for 70,051 square feet in the same building. Together, these companies bring the 230,389 square foot office building to 99% leased. Deltek was represented by Robb Johnson, Skip Orr and Jay Farmer of Jones Lang LaSalle. CA was represented by Harry Klaff, also of JLL. 

In general, activity in Herndon is picking up, Bob Wiberg, executive vice president and senior managing director of Brandywine Realty Trust, tells GlobeSt.com. “We can see it in the growing number of tours we do.” Not that he is proclaiming a return to the halcyon days of the mid-2000s. “Hopefully, we have seen the worst of things but the market is still not very active,” he says. “I would never write these submarkets off. They are IT enclaves for defense contractors and Herndon, in particular, reinvents itself fairly regularly.”