Apartment Developer AvalonBay Moving Headquarters to Liberty Center in Ballston

Two years after being put on hold, construction will resume next year on the Liberty Center’s final building in Ballston after it signed an office tenant.

AvalonBay Communities, a publicly-traded apartment developer and real estate investment trust, will relocate its headquarters to 4040 Wilson Blvd, which is set to be a 22-story mixed-use building with offices, retail and residential. It will be Ballston’s tallest building.

AvalonBay, which is already in the neighborhood at 671 N. Glebe Road, signed a lease for 73,000 square feet of office space on three floors — the eighth, ninth and 10th as well as a portion of the seventh — at the site owned by developer The Shooshan Company and Brandywine Realty Trust.

It joins VIDA Fitness, which will open its first non-D.C. location at the building. With this new signing, the building’s office space is 50 percent pre-leased.

Construction is now expected to start in the first quarter of next year. AvalonBay is projected to move in around mid-2020.

“When we decided to amend 4040 Wilson to a mixed-use building consisting of roughly a 50/50 split of office and residential and increased retail last year, we did so in an effort to adjust to the recent market trends which consisted of more prospective tenants in the [around] 75,000 [square feet] range, and more retail demand along Wilson Blvd.,” Kevin Shooshan, leasing director at The Shooshan Company, said in a statement. “Just about a year after county approval, we’re honored to have executed a pre-lease with a company as prestigious as AvalonBay, securing their headquarters location here in Arlington County for years to come.”

Previously, Shooshan told ARLnow that construction had been paused during a period of high office vacancies in Arlington and the rest of the D.C. region.

Image No. 1 via The Shooshan Company