Inside MakeOffices' New Clarendon Location
After signing a lease last summer, DC's home-grown co-working provider, MakeOffices, is opening its 40k SF flagship space in Clarendon on Monday, and it’s filling up fast.
It's filled more than half of the space already, and last week alone the team gave 39 tours to potential tenants. CEO Raymond Rahbar says it's filling up faster than he expected, and he predicts it will be functionally full by the Fourth of July.
The co-working space—MakeOffices' 10th location—occupies the second floor at the renovated 3100 Clarendon Blvd, just steps away from the Clarendon Metro Stop. The prime location has been key to attracting tenants, Ray says.
“We’re literally at the corner everybody wants to be at,” Ray told Bisnow as we toured the new location Friday morning. The space sits on top of three popular Clarendon night spots, including Mister Day's and Mad Rose Tavern. “This is the cool place.”
The building, owned by Piedmont Realty, used to be home to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Ray says while constructing the space, MakeOffices focused on creating more open common areas than its previous locations to help foster social interactions. “You don’t always want to sit an office all day,” Ray says.
The space has four different bullpens with a variety of open seating. The main common area, pictured above, fitted with four beer taps, coffee machines and commercial-grade fridges and freezers, seats up to 90 people and up to 150 for events.
The 135 offices in the space range from one-person rooms to 12-person rooms. In the corner office pictured above, brand-new startup Hungry works on its food delivery platform, aiming to be the “Uber of food.”
The space also has eight conference rooms (like the one above), 10 call rooms, two wellness rooms—MakeOffices' Tysons location was the first co-working space with a place for breastfeeding mothers, Ray says—and a relaxation room.
After opening its first location in Rosslyn in 2013, MakeOffices has since expanded to Philadelphia and Chicago. Ray says they are looking to take what they learned in other markets to improve its DC locations and expand in this market. MakeOffices plans to open its new Logan Square location later this year, which will be its seventh location in the region.
“We want to remind everybody that we’re DC kids,” Ray says.
Due to the boom of new startups with a handful of employees each, Ray says the ceiling for co-working space is sky-high. All of the co-working spaces in the DC region, he says, would fit into one big office building. MakeOffices is betting that there’s enough demand to fill several more.
“We think the market is big enough, we’re just at the beginning of tapping this coworking market,” chief marketing officer Shana Glanzer told Bisnow.
