NPR Searching For Tenants After Vacating Top Floors Of Headquarters
National Public Radio has emptied out of the upper portion of the headquarters building it moved into just over a decade ago in D.C.'s NoMa neighborhood.
The public media provider has put roughly 107K SF of its headquarters at 1111 N. Capitol St. NE up for lease. It owns the 331K SF property, which was developed for it in 2013.
The company has already vacated the space as it works to lease it, according to JLL's third-quarter office report. The space is listed as available for lease on LoopNet and in a Cushman & Wakefield marketing brochure.
NPR didn't respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Cushman & Wakefield's Laurie McMahon, James Collins, Ellison Cook and George Men are marketing the space for lease. The space consists of 35K SF available on the fifth floor and 36K SF on the seventh and eighth floors. Cushman didn't respond to Bisnow's request for comment.
The move comes after the media company laid off 10% of its staff — about 100 employees — in 2023, and cut four podcasts.
NPR moved 800 employees to the headquarters building in 2013 from 635 Massachusetts Ave. NW — its fourth time moving within the District. The building was an adaptive reuse of a four-story warehouse from the 1920s developed by Boston Properties and designed by Hickok Cole Architects.
The building is the site of NPR's famous Tiny Desk concerts — performances recorded live from a decked-out news desk, which has hosted superstar musicians like Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Usher and T-Pain, and last week, Billie Eilish.
Daily podcasts Up First and Morning Edition are also recorded out of the headquarters. Smithsonian offers tours of the headquarters building.
NPR is also attempting to sell its 25K SF Culver City office/studio, Bisnow first reported in October. Cushman & Wakefield is marketing that property as well.
NPR has lost money at an accelerating pace over the last two years. The company had a net loss of $13.3M last year and a net loss of $1.4M in 2022. In 2021, it had a positive net income of $16.9M, according to tax filings in ProPublica's nonprofit database.
A portion of NPR's funding comes from the federal government, but that money could be under threat under President-Elect Donald Trump's administration.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, introduced a bill to defund the $535M that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gives funding to NPR, PBS and local stations. The heads of Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have also called for cutting that funding.
D.C.'s office market had a 20% vacancy rate as of the end of September, according to JLL, and it had 181K SF of net occupancy loss in Q3. Sublease availability is at a three-year low with 3.2M SF available, per JLL.
International development organization Chemonics put over half of its Navy Yard headquarters up for sublease this year. Cushman & Wakefield is also marketing that 215K SF footprint, located at 1275 New Jersey Ave. SE, which Brookfield delivered in 2021.
