Gould Invests $25M to Reposition Market Square North

Gould Property Co. is spending $25 million to reposition a downtown D.C. holding, hoping that a thin supply of high-end office space will draw blue-chip tenants to a building it helped develop more than two decades ago.

The longtime D.C.-area owner is overhauling 401 Ninth St. NW, a 440,000-square-foot mixed-use property in the East End that it is rebranding as “401 on Ninth.” The work covers the four-story lobby, a new 6,300-square-foot fitness and wellness center, an expanded two-level, 200-person conference center, a 100-person auditorium, and a rooftop indoor-outdoor amenity the company calls The Solarium. Construction is underway, with completion targeted for next fall.

“It’s going to change the experience that you’re going to have from the moment you start approaching the building,” said CEO Giacomo Barbieri in a statement.

The timing is deliberate. D.C.’s trophy market, roughly 14 million square feet of top-renting buildings, is the second-tightest in the country behind Manhattan, with prime vacancy below 10%, according to CBRE’s midyear outlook. As of August, the market held just eight blocks of space larger than 50,000 square feet, and none offered a top floor.

That is the gap Gould is trying to fill. The building is 65.6% leased, and the company has a 175,000-square-foot contiguous block at the top of the tower that can come available by the third quarter of 2029, including 80,000 square feet being vacated by Troutman Pepper. Barbieri said Gould is in talks with potential “blue chip” tenants, which include law firms and corporations.

This is not the only move Gould has made recently. The company co-developed the property formerly known as Market Square North with Boston Properties (now BXP) in the early 2000s and took full ownership when BXP exited late last year.

The project lands amid a broader renovation wave. More than $210 million has been spent across 10 repositioning projects in D.C.’s commercial core since 2022, per CBRE, even with overall office vacancy near 22%.  Grosvenor is rebuilding 1701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW for White & Case, and Ponte Gadea is in talks with Simpson Thacher on an overhaul of 1445 New York Ave. NW. For Gould, the project is one piece of a 15-million-square-foot pipeline that also includes the Konterra master-planned development in Maryland and a planned office building at CityCenterDC.