(Mark Your Calendars: RealShare New Jersey 2011, September 13 in New Brunswick. RealShare New York takes place Oct. 12 at the Marriott Marquis.)
WASHINGTON, DC-Combined Properties has leased 15,979 square feet at 1025 Thomas Jefferson Street in Georgetown. Normally a lease of this size would attract scant attention in the District, except for this: It is among the first significant office leases to be inked in Georgetown by a tenant new to the submarket.
“We have done renewals and there have been leases from companies moving to one Georgetown office to the next,” Geoff Kieffer, a broker with Woodmark Commercial Properties tells GlobeSt.com. “But this is the first such transaction since the recession began for Georgetown.”
Kieffer, along with colleague Glenn Sutton, represented the building’s owner, the Japan-based NPS Ventures. Bruce McNair, Josh Hartman, David Roehrenbeck, Will Travis and Mike Molinari of Grubb & Ellis represented Combined Properties, which is moving from its current West End-based office at 1255 22nd St.
The office market in Georgetown suffers a peculiar fate: though a highly-coveted submarket, it has no nearby metro. That automatically eliminates large tenants such as the government and its contractors. It is, however, easily accessible by car. “People will locate their offices here for quality of life reasons,” Kieffer says. For this reason, Georgetown is usually the last submarket in the District to bounce back from a recession, he says. “Rosslyn, the East End, the CBD - they all start to lease up faster than Georgetown.”
Many of Georgetown’s office buildings are comparatively small, which mitigates somewhat the absence of the government. Not so 1025 Thomas Jefferson, however, which is 316,000 square foot. With the Combined Properties lease it will be 70% occupied. Kieffer says there are two other leases close to execution stage that will take another approximate 21,000 square feet in the building. “That’s more evidence to us that Georgetown’s office market is beginning to become active again,” he says.
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
