NIH Renews 124K SF Lease in Bethesda, Md.
By Nick Trombola July 29, 2024 2:51 pm
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The office of the National Institutes of Health is settling in for the long haul at its home in Bethesda, Md.
The NIH, through the General Services Administration, has signed a 10-year lease renewal for its 123,750-square-foot office at 6555 Rock Spring Drive, a largely glass-covered complex dubbed The Atrium at Rock Spring Park. The asking rent was not disclosed. The complex is about three miles northwest of NIH’s main campus at 9000 Rockville Pike in Bethesda.
MC Real Estate Partners is the landlord, represented by Merrill Turnbull, Brent Prossner, Jae Lee and Will Ruppe at Lincoln Property Company, while Gerrit Voogt and Joe Judge at JLL (JLL) and Joe Callahan at GUV Commercial Real Estate represented the GSA/NIH.
“All of us at MCRE are thrilled to continue the valued 15-year relationship we have with the NIH at The Atrium,” Andy Nathan, MC Real Estate Partners’ managing principal, said in a statement. “It is especially rewarding in these challenging times to see the significant investments we have made in building infrastructure and aesthetics resonate so powerfully. ”
Part of the reasoning behind the lease renewal is that the property accommodates GSA’s requirement of redundant power sources for NIH properties, according to the brokers. The property’s infrastructure also includes direct connectivity to a dark fiber conduit, which essentially allows NIH to operate its own private optical network, rather than leasing bandwidth through a telecommunications service provider.
The GSA is in the midst of actively reducing its office footprint across the U.S., though the NIH lease renewal is further proof that doesn’t mean the government intends to eliminate all office use.
The GSA and Department of Homeland Security, for example, are renovating the St. Elizabeths West Campus to make way for a new DHS headquarters — a roughly $3.5 billion project that will include new homes for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once work is completed in 2027.
However, the GSA has recently pumped the brakes on renovation plans for a new federal emergency management agency (FEMA) headquarters in southwest D.C., citing current market conditions.
Nick Trombola can be reached at NTrombola@commercialobserver.com.
