Art Santry and Kurt Richter

“You just have to ignore the chatter and the fear out there, and just keep on doing your job. Keep communicating with the tenants and try to find ways to create value for them.”

That’s Cushman & Wakefield’s Kurt Richter in answer to a question about any professional or life hacks he and longtime colleague Art Santry took away from doing business in the D.C. area during the pandemic.

The tenant rep duo had every reason not to be sanguine during 2020 and early 2021. Companies were reassessing their needs; landlord concessions were piling up; office rents were spiraling; office vacancy was so high that fundamental ideas about the D.C. market were giving way for good. “I’m not sure I’ll ever see a speculative office building built again in D.C.,” Santry said.

The two pressed forward, and executed 49 deals totaling 965,549 square feet in 2020, and some 15 deals totaling 86,000 square feet in 2021 as of mid-June. In fact, Richter and Santry — who have worked together since 1996, and who arrived together at Cushman & Wakefield in 2009 — were able to seize on the market disruption to negotiate better deals for their tenant clients.

“The transactions are so aggressive right now with rental abatement and buildout dollars, they’re able to really get a high-end buildout without coming out of pocket,” Richter said of law firms in D.C., a significant part of their business.

Speaking of legal practices, Richter and Santry represented Jones Day in a renewal for more than 205,000 square feet at 300 New Jersey Avenue NW. That deal closed in December 2020 and was the largest law firm leasing deal in D.C. last year, and perhaps the second largest in the entire United States.

It underscored both the influence of Richter and Santry on D.C. commercial real estate — the pair repped Jones Day in their previous two office leasing deals, going back decades — and how to capitalize on the market’s disruption.

“There was a real desire to get the deal done,” Richter said, “and there were some additional concessions that were put forth that we wouldn’t have really had.”