Overcoming the complexities of marketing high-security offices, the $220 million sale of a five-building portfolio in Northern Virginia served as a blueprint for other defense-oriented office sales in the region. The nuances involved in such a deal earned it a CoStar Impact Award for 2023 in the Washington, D.C. region, an honor chosen by a panel of local real estate professionals.
The NoVa Cybersecurity and Defense Infrastructure portfolio is an 860,500-square-foot set of buildings in Herndon, Chantilly, Dulles and Fairfax, Virginia. The properties are leased to four of the five largest defense companies in the United States: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.
Each office serves multiple federal defense and top-secret contracts, so the properties are heavily secured, with restricted access and some operating around the clock. This created certain barriers for marketing the properties, but a Cushman & Wakefield brokerage team instead leaned on the buildings' distinctive technology, including dark fiber connectivity and significant rooftop satellite installations, to appeal to prospective buyers.
The stable tenancy, as well as the portfolio’s location at the heart of a defense and technology hub, ultimately attracted buyer GI Partners. The San Francisco-based company acquired the offices from New York firms Turnbridge Equities and Fundamental Advisors.
The success of Cushman & Wakefield’s marketing of high-security defense offices displayed the attraction of defense facilities in suburban Washington, D.C., during a time of overall low liquidity in the office market.
About the properties: One Steeplechase, located at 21700 Atlantic Blvd. in Dulles, is 112,600 square feet and primarily leased to Northrop Grumman. General Dynamics occupies the 184,400-square-foot office at 12450 Fair Lakes Circle in Fairfax and the 85,000-square-foot office at 14700 Lee Road in Chantilly. Parkway Square at 460 Herndon Parkway in Herndon is a 205,00-square-foot property leased to Boeing. Two WillowWood Plaza buildings, at 10302 and 10304 Eaton Place in Fairfax, are both leased to software company Zeta Associates.
What the judges said: “[This] extremely complicated transaction required extraordinary sensitivity and expertise to effectively bundle and market five highly secure, mission-critical assets in a volatile economic climate,” said Mara Olguin, chief marketing officer at Dweck Properties.
They made it happen: The Cushman & Wakefield team that marketed the property comprised Eric Berkman, Bill Collins, Paul Collins, Shaun Collins, Ben Comm, Drew Flood, Marshall Scallan, Kevin Sidney, Tim Summers and Shaun Weinberg.
