WASHINGTON, DC-The McPherson Building, located at 901 15th St., NW, has secured Platinum LEED certification for Existing Buildings. The building, owned by Clarion Partners, is a 12-story, 246,014 square foot trophy office building over looking McPherson Square Park. It is one of just eight office buildings in Washington, DC to secure LEED EB Platinum. Cassidy Turley's Sustainability Services team handled the project management to achieve the certification.

LEED certification is still important to investors, even as the certification moves from the category of rare and unusual to "expected to have," says one broker currently marketing a LEED-certified building. But, this broker tells GlobeSt.com, it doesn't have the same marketing prominence that it did a few years ago. To put another way, the theory of LEED following the same path air conditioning did decades ago – once a luxury, now expected – is becoming closer to reality.

Indeed, what could arguably be more important – or certainly just as important -- to Clarion Partners' is McPherson's status as trophy building. Trophy buildings are defined as performing at the top 10% of the rental market and garnering the highest price per square foot. "Almost all trophy buildings are LEED, but it is not necessary," Jones Lang LaSalle's Amy Bowser. Other important trophy qualities—qualities that are not necessarily specific to LEED—include a strong location, strong sponsorship and usually feature significant architecture design by a top firm, Bowser says.