WUDAC Update: A 3-D Look at B.F. Saul's Early Concept Plans

Slowly, meeting by meeting, B.F. Saul’s plans for developing the site as part of a public-private partnership are coming into focus, although the plans are still at the concept phase. 

Bob Wulff, senior vice president for B.F. Saul and the project manager on the site, brought three additional views of the current plan for the triangle area of the site between Reedie, Georgia and Veirs Mill.

The plans show a 3-D concept of the site. An office space, with five floors of parking and ground level flex retail (meaning, it can be used as separate retail stores or the office’s lobby), takes up a majority of the site. A business-class hotel faces Reedie. At the point of the triangle, Saul has “land banked” a portion of the site for future residential.

“We now cannot build high rise residential,” he said, adding that apartment rents in the area were currently at $2 to 2.35 a square foot, and Saul was estimating $2.90 to $3 rents needed to be able to build affordably on the site.

“The game changer here in downtown Wheaton is office and hotel,” Wulff said, “Not that other uses are not important.”

The total build on the site would be 900,000 square feet, 250,000 of it office.

In a cart-before-the-horse situation, the project won’t get off the ground until a major office tenant is found. Wulff said they’d need 150 thousand of the office space preleased before they could get the loan to build. The company is banking on a federal tenant to be the “first mover” in Wheaton.

To that end, they are working with the GSA. Security concerns around the planned concrete platform over the current bus bays will cut down on the number of possible federal tenants.

And caps on what the GSA allows for rents mean Saul, the County and WMATA will have to have a separate conversation about what the public in “public-private partnership” means.

“Those discussions are going to start very soon,” Wulff said, “Then we can do what we call a pro-forma: this is what its going to cost, here’s the rents, here’s the profits, here’s the overhead, then you solve for the land value.”

Wulff didn’t want to speculate on what the County or WMATA would do in such a situation, but said in his prior experience working at HUD managing public-private partnerships, “generally land is one of the things that the public puts in the deal, because that’s what they have."

Previous B.F. Saul/Wheaton Redevelopment Coverage:

B.F. Saul Meets