GERMANTOWN, MD-This local submarket is getting a healthy dose of absorption thanks to a series of events kicked off by MedImmune’s ever-growing need for space in the 1-270 corridor. CB Richard Ellis’ Dennis Owen, David Palank and Ben Powell represented the building owner, Multi-Employer Property Trust, in the transaction.
Namely, URS, a global engineering design firm headquartered in San Francisco, has signed a 91,350-square-foot lease at 12420 Milestone Center Dr., a six-story, class A, LEED Gold office building in the Milestone Business Park here. The company will be moving from its current location in Gaithersburg, MD this summer now that the new owner of its current office building, MedImmune, has released it four years early from its lease.
The events that led URS to Germantown started off by MedImmune’s and URS’ mutual decision that they both needed new space to grow. But MedImmune, in particular, needed URS’s space, Owen tells me. MedImmune owns most of the buildings in URS’s vicinity--except for the one it was in.
Eventually MedImmune was able to convince the owner, Washington Real Estate Investment Trust, to sell the property, 200 Orchard Ridge, at the end of 2010. Also known as the Ridges office building, the property traded for $27.5 million. WRIT achieved a net book gain of $3.8 million and posted an unleveraged internal rate of return was 11% over the four-year holding period.
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