A Ballston office clears at $299 a foot

Newmark has arranged the $56.25 million sale of 4075 Wilson Boulevard, an 188,014-square-foot office building in Arlington's Ballston submarket, from FarmViewVentures LLC, Rithm Capital Corp. and GreenBarn Investment Group to an institutional buyer, per Connect CRE's report of the trade. Jud Ryan and James P. Cassidy, executive managing directors in Newmark Capital Markets, and vice president Grant Marley represented the seller, and the financing goes unnamed. That leaves the price as the only number anyone has to work with.

Dividing the price by the square footage puts the basis at $299 a foot, and the rent roll behind it runs from a fully leased ground floor—Sweetgreen, Grazie Nonna, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, Pinnacle Bank—through office floors occupied by Nalej Corporation, KnowBe4, Systems Planning & Analysis, OpenText Public Sector and a wider set the report groups as government contractors, technology companies and professional services firms. More than $6 million of strategic capital improvements, roughly $32 a foot, have gone into the building at Wilson Boulevard and North Randolph Street, across from Ballston Quarter and near the Ballston Metro station.

That $299 is a leasing number, and it looks steeper against the recent marks in Norfolk and Atlanta: in August, Kawa Capital Management paid $111 a foot at 150 West Main in Norfolk for a 90%-occupied building, and in September two Vinings towers traded at $34 a foot with an all-in basis near $50. Those are different submarkets and different assets, none of them Ballston, but the distance between those trades and this one is the value of a signed, federal-adjacent rent roll, and the $6 million of improvements suggests the sellers spent their way to it.

The buyer's underwriting is legible even without a name, because at $299 a foot in the D.C. suburbs the wager sits on the roster renewing—contractors, a cybersecurity firm, a public-sector software unit among them—more than on the structure holding them, and three owners agreed the number was right to exit on. The institutional investor on the other side now carries the roll, and whether debt sits under that basis is not in the report.

As this publication has argued, the 2026 office clearing basis is being set in the debt stack rather than at closing tables, and a trade of this size with no lender in evidence is either the exception or a financing that has not surfaced. In Needham, lenders re-entered behind equity only after the trade had priced. Ballston has now priced at $299 a foot; if a lender steps in behind it, the office debt market's re-entry has reached the D.C. suburbs.