Mid Day Report

I haven’t posted as much as I would have liked to this week. It’s been a fairly frenetic week and I’m a little out of shape for frenetic weeks. They’ve been few and far between in my commercial real estate world for awhile now.

I spent a great deal of time in a car this week covering ground from Fort Meade to Gainesville, Virginia. I wasn’t the only local real estate guy spending time in NoVa either. This week, Columbia based COPT announced that they had acquired 15 acres of land for an office development site that is within tin cans and string distance from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield. COPT continues to cozy up close to the defense intelligence community.

This very same community has been much on my radar this week too. The office building we are developing in Emerson just so happens to be targeted towards the same end user. We’ve started telling folks that our project is green, lean and mean. Green because we are building to a LEED Gold standard for energy and environmental design. Lean because we are building one of the largest floor plates in the region in a long rectangle. That translates into a great deal of natural light to flood the space. And finally, Mean because we are also building to a blast resistant standard that is far beyond the building code. It’s like the Toughbook of office buildings.

I’ve also been helping out some main stream media folks this week. They are working on stories about this growing sector of our country’s defense. Cyber is the new BRAC, if ya know what I mean. I’ll have more to say about that once they publish their stuff but suffice it to say for now that the experience was interesting.

As soon as I wrap up this post I’m heading over to the press preview at the Stanford Grill. I haven’t had lunch yet today so I’m hoping they lay out some good eats.

After that I think I’ll take the old black dog down to Yappy Hour at the Wine Bin in Ellicott City. It goes from six to nine. Nice night for it too.