When the Corporate Executive Board, a fast-growing research firm headquartered in the District, relocates to Rosslyn this summer, it will become one of the county’s top employers.
Corporate Executive Board will move its 1,800 employees into a brand-new, 620,000-square-foot office building that is part of a mixed-use development by Bethesda-based JBG Companies. Virginia Hospital Center is the county’s largest employer with 2,363 workers. Lockheed Martin, which also has 1,800 employees; Verizon, Marriott and SAIC round out the top five employers in Arlington.
Corporate Executive Board is just one of numerous companies that Arlington has landed recently, a plus for a county that has taken some hits to its work force in recent years.
Despite extremely low unemployment in Northern Virginia — it hovers under 2 percent — and projections for hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the coming years, Arlington has struggled to keep pace with other Northern Virginia counties, Arlington Economic Development Director Terry Holzheimer said.
“That kind of strong job growth has not been our history,” he said. “We’ve taken some lumps.”
The county suffered a setback after 9/11 and more recently when the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office relocated to Alexandria.
But several companies, including the Corporate Executive Board and DFI International, have plans to move into Arlington from the District, largely because of less expensive lease rates across the river.
“[Washington is] more expensive in general for the space,” HireStrategy President and CEO Paul Villella said. “Especially when you’re growing at the rate the conference board is.”
Rental rates are about $30 per square foot in Northern Virginia and about $44 in the District, according to figures from real estate firm Cushman Wakefield.
Arlington will deliver more than 1 million square feet of office space this year and 886,000 square feet of that is already leased.
“There was a dead period when not a lot of new stuff came online [in Arlington],” Villella said. “But recently there’s a lot of new buildings going up. They’re going to catch up a little bit.”
