Cvent Leases 130 KSF in Tysons Corner, Va.

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Cvent, a leading maker of event-management software, will take about 130,000 square feet of space at Greensboro Station, a Tysons Corner, Va., office campus, it was announced Wednesday morning by the Fairfax County (Va.) Economic Development Authority.

The company’s relocation to 1710 Solutions Drive from its current HQ, only about half a mile away, is also an expansion that will see 400 employees added, to the existing 450, over about the next three years, a Cvent spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive.

The lease also represents a big step forward for the campus’s owner, The Meridian Group, of Bethesda, Md. Meridian closed on the purchase in late July using about $105 million in debt financing and about $75 million in equity, which was also intended to include roughly $20 million to reposition two of the campus’s three towers. <www.commercialsearch.com/news/regions/the-meridian-group-acquires-saic-corporate-headquarters-in-northern-virginia/> <www.commercialsearch.com/news/regions/mid-atlantic/eastdil-gets-100m-in-financing-for-meridians-purchase-of-3-class-a-office-towers/>

The twist is that Meridian bought Greensboro Station knowing that the campus’ occupant and seller, SAIC, would be vacating two of the three buildings.

That situation arose from the split of SAIC Inc. into two independent, publicly traded companies. Science Applications International Corp. will encompass the technical, engineering and enterprise IT services business, while spin-off Leidos will handle “government and commercial solutions.”

The upshot, Meridian managing director Gary Block told CPE, is that save for a long-term lease by SAIC for 170, 000 square feet in Tower III, the 640,000-square-foot campus will be vacant once the SAIC/Leidos split is complete. The new long-term lease with Cvent thus alters that at one stroke, absorbing about 20 percent of Greensboro Station’s total current space.

Not only will substantially more leasing be needed to refill the campus, but when Meridian bought the fee simple interest in the existing Greensboro Station towers, it also took a contract option to acquire the balance of the 18.3-acre site, entitled for 3.2 million square feet of additional, mixed-use development. Block told CPE he expects it will take Meridian at least five years to exercise that option.

In all, Meridian plans to develop more than 1.3 million square feet of residential space and more than 1.1 million square feet of further office space, as well as a 400-room hotel and up to 200,000 square feet of retail space.

All of this should be helped by the completion, in the first quarter of 2014 and essentially across the street, of the Greensboro station on the Washington Metro’s new Silver Line. Cvent will be moving in later in 2014.