Business leaders in the community gathered to talk about commercial and residential development in the area at the Prince William Chamber of Commerce’s headquarters.
Moderated by Pete Dolan of Walsh, Colucci, Lubeley & Walsh, Truett Young of Stanley Martin Companies and Russ Gestl of Buchanan Partners discussed the shifts and challenges of real estate development in Prince William County.
Gestl discussed the changes that developers have seen in building office space in Northern Virginia over the past several years.
“Over the past 20 years we’ve developed some 14 office buildings in the D.C. Metro area. Seven of those were in Prince William County…changes have been drastic – how people use space, how much space they need, and where they want to have their workplace all changed drastically,” said Gestl.
According to Gestl, companies are finding it difficult to secure financing to build more office buildings, in part because of existing vacancies.
“In the D.C. Metro region there’s 65 million square feet of vacant office space,” said Gestl.
Young touched on how developments in general in Prince William County have faced challenges, as the amount of “green field” open space has decreased.
“There’s a number of different trends in the market…we spend a lot of time discussing, you know, office buildings…there is much less availability of pure green field developments. Back in the day, everyone would just rezone and develop farms…now it’s gotten to the point where residential has become such a dirty word with the constituency that it makes it very difficult inside the new development area to develop just pure residential green field development,” said Young.
According to Young, working on mixed-use developments is one way to handle this challenge.
Recently, Prince William County established a goal to have 35% of the county’s tax revenue to come from commercial spaces.
While Young and Gestl acknowledged the reasoning behind this goal, there were some concerns about the balancing act between residential and commercial, and the unintended consequences of the shift.
“I think the goal should be – we want to be balanced in our tax base. Whatever gives us the highest revenue generation, you know, through a right mix. Creating successful places – place making,” said Gestl, continuing, “Every jurisdiction has a goal to increase their commercial tax base – it’s not that it’s a bad goal – but to put that kind of a number on it does send a message to the region that ‘What are you thinking.’”
Dolan spoke about how population projections from the University of Virginia predict that in the next 20 years, Prince William County’s population will grow by 200,000.
“In Prince William County, there is going to be a shortage of homes. Honestly, it does not matter where they are in the county – we are going to hit crisis levels I’m guessing in 2021,” said Young.
Stanley Martin recently took on a mixed-use development project in Manassas, in part because of the trendiness of the development concept, and that’s impact on the market.
“The public perception of what is cool actually matters a lot in buying a home. People will buy a home for a variety of reasons and one of those reasons in this case – we believe our customer base will buy homes here – is there is a really great brewery going in, and there’s a lot of development across the street,” said Young.
And while developers are facing challenges, there are things that Prince William County government does that are positive, according to Young.
“Prince William County has done a great job with their development staff…it sets them apart from the other municipalities that we’ve worked in in Loudoun and Fairfax County – the ability to actually get through the red tape and get an answer,” said Young.
