Finmarc to Keep Up D.C.-Area Deal Momentum With $200M Spend in 2025

Fresh off its major bargain for a four-building office portfolio in Northern Virginia, Finmarc Management has big plans to keep its investment momentum elevated throughout 2025.

The Bethesda, Md.-based investment and management firm aims to spend roughly $200 million on assets this year, exceeding its various acquisition deals for more than 1.3 million square feet of office and retail space across the DMV in 2024, the company announced on Tuesday. While Finmarc has historically focused on value-add retail and industrial space, the company has more recently taken a liking to certain office properties — particularly if it can acquire them at big discounts. 

That includes Dulles Corner, the four-building, 620,000-square-foot office complex just east of Dulles International Airport that it acquired from private equity firm Rockpoint at the end of last year. Finmarc paid just $51 million for the complex, barely more than one-third of the $141.5 million Rockpoint paid for it in 2018. Or there’s Trinity Centre — another four-building, 500,000-square-foot office park, this one in Centreville, Va. — that Finmarc purchased for just $39 million in August. It also acquired a roughly 185,000-square-foot shopping plaza in Frederick, Md., for $30 million in July. 

“We are highly differentiated from our peer group by our ability to immediately access internal capital and react quickly and decisively to emerging opportunities we uncover or that are presented to us,” Neil Markus, Finmarc’s principal, said in a statement. “The entire Finmarc team is local and compact, and we are not bound by opinions of any outside investors or by achieving a defined internal rate-of-return goals.”

That quick reaction time is likely what allowed Finmarc to take advantage of those discount windows. Indeed, the firm is one of only a few local real estate companies that maintained its acquisition pacing throughout 2024, Markus said. 

“The commercial office submarkets in and around the greater District of Columbia area are steadily shrinking due to building conversions to residential uses, but we are confident that the recent return-to-work agenda will have a substantial impact on leasing and create new demand for office space regionally,” he added.

Despite Finmarc’s bullish attitude, and despite signs of improvement this past quarter, Northern Virginia’s office market remains challenged. Office vacancy at the end of 2024 was 23.6 percent — down 10 basis points from the previous quarter, but well above the pre-pandemic level, according to a recent quarterly market report from CBRE. Still, the region saw about 116,000 square feet of positive absorption in the fourth quarter of last year, largely due to lease renewals and new tenant locations, though there were no new office properties that were completed, or even begun, in Northern Virginia throughout all of 2024, per CBRE.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.