Photos: Courtesy Savills
Thomas Fulcher, Julie Rayfield and Art Greenberg
Vice chairman, mid-Atlantic region lead and director; vice chairman and co-regional manager; and vice chairman at Savills
The state of D.C.’s office market last year might be described as a nearly steady diet of nothing — with very few leases cracking the 50,000-square-foot mark — but Savills’s Thomas Fulcher, Julie Rayfield and Art Greenberg got their fill.
Their team inked a total of 116 deals last year, totaling 3.2 million square feet, which was a significant improvement to the 66 deals they closed in 2021.
“I think we have a really strong team, really good people, and we develop relationships with clients that put a lot of trust in us over the years,” Fulcher said. “I think a good performance is expected on our part.”
Those deals include representing Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in its relocation to 67,782 square feet at the Victor Building in the East End and brokering law firm Allen & Overy’s expansion to 40,914 square feet at 1101 New York Avenue. Even with that, last year wasn’t completely business as usual, and the team has had to steer clients through the shifting, post-pandemic remote-work policies.
“The last year was really helping people get through the new normal; there’s a lot of challenges related to how people are working,” Fulcher said. “With some tenants, there was a drive towards efficiency that has just continued.”
On the government side of things, Rayfield works with the U.S. General Services Administration to steer the leasing of the federal government’s property manager, and the agency has now started to have the same conversations as private companies about the shifting use of office space.
Federal agencies have “been embracing the same kind of strategies and the changes in the office environment as the private sector,” Rayfield said. “It’s just a little bit behind where the private sector is.”
Despite that, the Savills team has been able to keep up its government work the past year, focusing on helping the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lease spaces for outpatient clinics.
It’s that diversification — focusing on government, private sector and increasingly life sciences companies — that has helped Savills get through this office market, Rayfield added.
