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When to lease your own office space

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When should a startup decide to begin leasing its own space? We asked Philip Brady and Anna Shaffer, two tenant representatives at Savills Studley, to explain how the real estate market in D.C. has evolved in recent years into a more advantageous environment for early-stage tech startups.

1. Some companies don’t need their own office space.

D.C. has grown several coworking spaces in recent years, and there’s a reason why a lot of small tech companies are flocking to those. They “really cater to the startup, to the entrepreneur,” said Shaffer. They “offer some great flexibility with regards to timing, lease terms and shared amenities.”

Sometimes, it’s just not the right time to move. “Management can be very overzealous,” said Brady, “with the idea of getting a cool new office space.” But before entering in a lease agreement, it’s best to be on a stable financial footing, and avoid personal guarantees.

The value of proprietary office space also depends on the startup’s medium-term goals and exit strategy. Some questions growing startups need to ask themselves, before looking for their own space: “Do they want a specific identity and branding? Are they entertaining clients?” said Shaffer.

2. However, if you’re starting to feel too big for your coworking space, now’s a good time to shop around.

The local real estate market has grown more amenable to growing early-stage ventures. The “two largest occupiers of space — law firms and the GSA — are downsizing,” said Brady.

That’s partly a result of new technologies: there is less need today for tangible libraries, and more and more employees chose to telework, he explained. “Someone needs to come in and absorb that space,” said Brady.

“The tech industry is ideally going to be that industry.” The downsizing of lobbying firms and law offices is also contributing to the mini tech boom, as more and more technologists are encouraged to trade sectors.

3. How to get the best deal in the current market.

When the value of office space in more pricey buildings — the ones that usually host law firms — declines, then all market prices are pulled down. That’s partly why real estate concessions — bonuses used by landlords to make a contract more attractive — are peaking. Meanwhile, tenant representative firms like Savills Studley are entering the fray to represent early-stage tech companies seeking in real estate deals.

To exploit these trends and get a good deal, companies should watch out for the fine print in their lease agreements. A good package includes favorable concessions — like free rent and tenant improvement dollars, early termination rights, or the possibility to relocate within the building. Watch out for annual rent escalations, badly administered tenant expenses and being in the boondocks (location, location, location, remember?).


How the rise of H Street inspired real-estate crowdfunding platform Fundrise

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Food meets fashion meets crowdfunding: The new H Street space Maketto combines restaurant and retail with the added distinction of being born from the first real estate crowdfunding project in the country.

When the original founders of D.C.-based Fundrise bought the property in 2011, “it was a vacant building [that] hadn’t had a certificate of occupancy for fifty years,” said founding member Brandon Jenkins.

At the time, H Street “was very nightlife driven,” he added. “During the day most of the bars and restaurants were closed.” So, they envisioned “this 24/7 kind of atmosphere that we felt would be something that would be entirely unique for D.C.”

Tell that to the institutional investors.

“It was very challenging,” said Jenkins. The neighborhood “was new, it was still growing. It was not the cookie cutter box.”

Instead, they went to the public with their project. “We could raise more money, faster and more efficiently by going out to the crowd,” he said.

That’s how Fundrise undertook its first crowdfunding campaign, filing paperwork with the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Virginia and the SEC. The process took almost a year.

“They’d never seen or heard anybody who wanted to take a physical property and essentially make ownership of the property available to the public,” said Jenkins.

When it kicked off, the H Street space raised $325,000 from 175 unaccredited investors, who each chipped in $100 to $10,000 each. “Those investors became actual equity owners,” explained Jenkins. The company, Fundrise, was both equity owner and developer.

After two-and-a-half years of development, powered by the crowdfunding round, bank loans and direct investment from Fundrise, a sleek new space opened earlier this month.

Fundrise leased the property, located at 1351 H St. NE, to chef Erik Bruner-Yang and streetwear designer Will Sharp. The two decided to join their talents for a combined retail-and-dining experience.

Spurred by that first project, Fundrise launched in August 2012, with CEO Benjamin Miller and president Daniel Miller at its helm. The two brothers — former partners at real estate development firm WestMill Capital Partners — were joined by a third developer, Jenkins, and a CTO Kenny Shin.

Their second crowdfunded property was also on H Street. The third one was in Shaw. All in all, the company has overseen investment rounds for about 10 properties in D.C., and about 50 nationwide.

Since 2013, Fundrise has also begun underwriting investment deals for other real estate companies and pushing them onto the platform.

UberOffices just bought its first building

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UberOffices, the rapidly growing network of coworking spaces that first launched in Arlington, has bought its first building in the trendy Logan Circle area.

“It’s about where do you want to plant a flag for the next 30 to 40 years,” said UberOffices founder and CEO Raymond Rahbar. “Can you think of a cooler neighborhood?”

The new location will be one of nine currently in the works, including two in Philadelphia and three in Chicago. UberOffices has five spaces up and running at this stage.

UberOffices bought the building, at 1509 16th St. NW, from Family Matters of Greater Washington for $14.5 million, with an estimated renovation cost of $5 million.

The new location will comprise 35,000 square feet on multiple levels, and is set to open in February 2016, said Rahbar.

DC’s real-life SimCity startup raises $2.2 million

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Create, an immersive 3D website for real-estate nerds, has finished raising a $2.2 million seed round.

The platform, which pulls in data on D.C.’s buildings from public agencies and commercial sources, launched in January after three years of development.

Create went on to raise $1.1 million, the first part of its seed round, in February. The second $1.1 million installation, which brings the total to $2.2 million, was led by 20 “senior executives from across real estate, hedge funds, and banking,” according to a company press release.

Several of them were return investors, cofounder and COO Edward Switzer told Technical.ly DC.

With the funding, the company will focus on designing additional premium products, including new data sets, search functionalities and GeoEnrichment of the data, and pursue its expansion into new markets.

Switzer said in January that the company planned to reach 10 cities by the end of 2015, including Detroit, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.

JLL disrupts own industry, launches online commercial real estate platform

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HiRise, the passion project of a handful of D.C.-based Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) employees, launched officially Wednesday.

It’s sort of like Zillow for office space.

As we wrote previously, the platform allows prospective renters to rifle through different options, but also review the fine print and seal deals online.

It simplifies the process for tenants, notably for spaces that are smaller than 5,000 square feet.

JLL is launching the platform first in D.C. because of the shifting nature of the local real estate market and the various types of companies established here, from startups to government contractors.

“The D.C. technology community really needs this tool,” Eastern Foundry cofounder Geoff Orazem said in a JLL press release.

Orazem said the incubator’s members have used the platform to search for office spaces: “Our ecosystem at Eastern Foundry is built on breaking down barriers for tech startups and government contractors so that they can spend more time working on their business, and that’s exactly what HiRise will do for them.”

Fundrise is sending drones to shoot aerial footage of new properties

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Real estate crowdfunding platform Fundrise is trying out drone videos to show off potential properties to investors — and to help ascertain their value.

“It gives you a bird’s-eye view,” said CEO Ben Miller. Earlier this month, the company sent out an UAV to catch a glimpse of a Santa Monica building from up top.

Drones can be used by developers to get a sense of the neighborhood, get shots of the property from above and check on traffic levels in a given area.

These important details are currently being gathered with various satellite image-based apps, like Google Maps, said Miller. But those are not always accurate enough for commercial real estate’s purpose.

Collecting up-to-date pictures is essential in a business where location, location, location is key.

“Instead of being a burned-out parking lot across the street, it may [now] be a … boutique hotel,” said Miller.

The industry also employs old-fashioned methods: “You hire a company to go stand in a corner and count people all day,” said Miller.

Using aerial drone views to calculate foot traffic could minimize these costs substantially. “It’s cheaper to send a drone than to send a person,” he said.

“In a real estate your bias is not to innovate,” said Miller. “In a building if you do something wrong it’s much harder to fix it’s more capital intensive.”

But now, more and more commercial real estate agencies are trying them out. DroneBase, the company Fundrise rented its drone from, is specialized in that market.

Plus, Fundrise got its start going against the grain of its lumbering industry: It invested in H Street properties that institutional investors wanted no part of.

Why Aaron Rinaca left LivingSocial for this JLL-backed real estate venture

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When Aaron Rinaca joined LivingSocial in 2010, the deals website was still very much a startup.

“My desk was still in its Ikea box,” he said. “I had to assemble it myself.”

Though he came in to work in IT, he occasionally helped the company negotiate its new office spaces.

And, within a couple years, he became head of global real estate, overseeing the opening and acquisition of about 75 offices in 15 countries, he said.

That was a “crash course in commercial real estate,” said Rinaca. A rugged field to be in.

It might sometimes take months, or even more than a year, to finagle a workspace for new recruits during the company’s high-growth years, he said.

“I developed this real interest and also sympathy for folks that were in that same position.”

So when he heard “murmurs” about HiRise, a new leasing platform envisioned by Jones Lang LaSalle executives Andy O’Brien and David Adams, his ears perked up.

“The platform was solving the real-world pain that I was experiencing on a day-to-day basis at LivingSocial,” he said.

He soon joined in as product director.

The three men have tried as best they could to make a home for their startup inside JLL’s cubicle-encumbered space.

“We’ve taken down as many of those walls as possible,” said Rinaca.

Meanwhile, the startup has a seemingly infinite pool of human capital, with 20-30 employees working full time on the project.

HiRise, which soft launched in July, started off with 40 listings in the D.C. area and has now been solicited by 15 new locations. It’s kind of like Zillow for office space.

Check out this map of DC’s construction projects

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If you’re one of these people who like to complain that D.C.’s condo construction bonanza has made the city feel like Mad Max, there’s now an easy way to gather concrete evidence for your gripes.

The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has published a list of ongoing real estate projects, in map form.

You can scroll around and find who is responsible for the incessant Saturday morning noise (the project manager), how long construction has been going on for and when it is supposed to finally end.

See the map

(h/t DCist)


Blackboard is going back to where it all started

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D.C. edtech darling Blackboard is moving its headquarters to the downtown building where it first took up office space after its 1997 launch.

According to a Washington Business Journal report, the company plans to relocate in November to 1111 19th St. NW, where it will take up three floors.

The company had considered a Clarendon location, as well as other places in Virginia and Maryland. But in the end the District retained a symbolic and practical appeal, Blackboard Senior VP Michael Stanton told the newspaper.

“We are the tech poster child for D.C., and after a really serious search effort, and after some very significant courting from Arlington and Virginia, at the end of the day, after 17 years in business, we are a D.C.-centric business,” he said.

Blackboard’s offices are currently located on Massachusetts Avenue, in the Mount Vernon Square area.

The company also announced Thursday the acquisition of Nivel Siete, expanding its stable of subsidiaries that work with the open-source Moodle platform. Nivel Siete is based in Bogotá, Colombia.

Meet SAM100, DC’s new school-building robot

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A new bricklayer has joined the crew building a new high school in Foxhall.

That new worker is a robot: Sam, short for SAM100, which is short for “semi-automated mason.”

The new construction tool is being used by Clark Construction Group to help build The Lab School’s new campus.

Sam is the first commercially available, on-site, bricklaying robot in the world, the Washington Business Journal reports.

The patent-pending robot weighs about 300 pounds, runs on a propane generator and can be carried around the construction site in a forklift. It can sense whether a brick is usable, and where it needs to go. Good job, Sam.

Watch SAM100 at work

How SwingSpace is updating the commercial real estate market

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When you deal in real estate, it’s good business to have an attractive piece of it yourself.

On the 7th floor of 21 Dupont Circle I’m ushered in to a conference room with floor-to-ceiling glass and panoramic views of the city below. “This is where I take people when I want to impress them,” SwingSpace COO and cofounder Zak Kidd tells me.

I can see why.

SwingSpace, which launched at the end of January, is the brain child of Kidd, a serial entrepreneur, and Richard McBride, a long-time commercial real estate broker. Essentially it’s a platform that allows landlords, and some tenants, to easily lease unused space in their offices to small companies in search of some space — perhaps only for a week, perhaps for longer. It’s like “the Airbnb of office leasing,” McBride said. And somewhat similar to the Baltimore-based Kinglet.

Kidd and McBride met at a Fosterly networking event years ago, when Kidd was in the process of searching for more space for his growing film and software development company, Dupont Studios. As it turned out, McBride had some extra space.

And not only did McBride have extra space himself, but being in the commercial real estate market he happened to know that about 5-10 percent of the roughly 470 million square feet of office space in D.C. is lying empty at any given time.

Those in the know call it “phantom space.”

Looking up at 21 Dupont Circle from the atrium entrance. (Photo by Tajha Chappellet-Lanier)

Looking up at 21 Dupont Circle. (Photo by Tajha Chappellet-Lanier)

This “phantom space” lies empty for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, in the commercial real estate market, five- to 10-year leases are the norm. But if you’re a growing company, let’s say a startup, a lot can change in five or 10 years. It’s easy to scale up or down your workforce depending on circumstance or need, but it is not easy to scale up or down your workspace.

So what happens is that companies lease spaces that are too big, hoping to “grow into” them. “A lot of business owners have extra space,” McBride said. “They just don’t know what to do with it.”

On the other hand, brokers are unlikely to help tenants find people to sublease unused space (even if the terms of their lease permit), because it’s just not a good return on investment. “It’s like trying to live just on bamboo shoots,” McBride explained. “Yeah, like a panda,” Kidd chimed in.

At this point I’d like to take a step back and introduce Kidd and McBride, as a team.

Kidd, you may have guessed, is the tech guy. He created the SwingSpace site, and oversees the filming of a walk-through video that’s posted with each listing. McBride is the industry guy. He’s got many connections in the commercial real estate world, with landlords, tenants and fellow brokers.

But even beyond their distinct roles, Kidd and McBride contrast and complement each other in myriad ways. Kidd is tall and warm and hospitable and even-keeled and maybe a bit cerebral, while McBride is springy and energetic and moves quickly, propelled by seemingly unstoppable enthusiasm. In the minutes we talk, he delivers a lot of great one-liners.

OK, back to SwingSpace.

Years after their initial meeting, Kidd and McBride decided that there was something missing in the commercial real estate market, and that they could use technology to solve the problem. SwingSpace was born.

It works like this: Landlords, and tenants whose leases permit, can list available space on SwingSpace for free. Potential lessors take a video tour, then apply online. Simple. The spaces are generally 2,500 square feet or less and already built out.

And SwingSpace isn’t trying to displace brokers, or anything. In fact, their listings benefit from the help McBride’s traditional commercial real estate contacts. The company is seeking to streamline a process brokers traditionally don’t do very well, and perhaps don’t want to be doing either. Recall the “living off bamboo” comment above.

On the tenant side, Kidd tells me companies that look for space on SwingSpace are between the coworking stage and the leasing their own office stage. Maybe they’ve outgrown coworking, or it’s not a good culture fit or they just want some privacy. “It’s like a bird,” McBride illustrated. “You get big enough you’ve gotta leave the nest.”

SwingSpace is now an option for spreading those proverbial wings.

How Atlas Lane wants to reinvent residential property management

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Atlas Lane grew, originally, out of personal frustration.

Founder Trever Faden was trying to find a property manager for his property on 17th Street, and was thoroughly unimpressed by the given options. There had to be a way to improve the system, Faden thought, and for a developer and serial entrepreneur, the answer had to be tech.

Now, with the launch of his new company, Faden is hoping that the answer is Atlas Lane.

The concept is pretty simple. There are essentially two markets in residential property management — the market managing large buildings, or groupings of large buildings, and the market managing a small number of units (think one to four). The former is generally serviced by large companies, and this is not the market Atlas Lane is interested in capturing. The latter, though, is often serviced by some unsatisfactory conglomerate of handymen or property owners or, worse, real estate agents.

Trever Faden

Trever Faden. (Photo via LinkedIn)

This, Faden thinks, is where opportunity lies.

Atlas Lane will strive to make both tenants and property owners happy with the property management process by using technology to augment services such as securing a lease, collecting rent, managing tenants and providing maintenance and repair services. Basically the goal is to “make tenants actually like working with a property manager,” Faden said.

For example, tenants will be able to easily pay rent through an app to which their bank, credit card or debit card information is already linked. Instead of sending unanswered emails in search of maintenance help, they’ll get live troubleshooting through the app as well. There will be more, Faden promises, as the technology, and his service, evolve.

Property owners, for their part, have a dashboard where they can track rental-related expenses for tax purposes, and will receive an auto-filled Schedule E at the end of the year.

The company is launching in D.C. (and inside-the-Beltway Maryland) because, well, there are a lot of rentals in the area. And, despite the fact that it seems like a new 100-unit condo building is going up every day, there are still many smaller fish — owners with a single unit they need someone to take care of.

For Faden, Atlas Lane is an adventure into something new. He hasn’t got a background in real estate — his last tech company was in marketing. Also new to Faden is the fact that he’s now running a cash-flow business with little need for VC funding. Atlas Lane already has some customers, and is accepting more on a rolling basis, taking care to keep the quality of service high.

One gets the sense that being self-funded gives Faden a feeling of freedom and control, similar emotions, perhaps, to those Atlas Lane hopes to offer its clients.

DC’s AreaProbe is through to the finals of Comcast’s Innovations 4 Entrepreneurs competition

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Curvin LeathamDonovan Anderson and Edward Faustin, the founders of AreaProbe, were working out of 1776 one day when they encountered a flyer for Comcast’s Innovations 4 Entrepreneurs competition. The three decided to apply — why not?

Now, the early-stage, D.C.-based startup has won the regional round of the competition (and with it, $10,000 in grant funding) and is through to the finals with $20,000 more on the line. In this next stage, Leatham, Anderson and Faustin are seeking public support.

So what’s AreaProbe, you ask?

Leatham told Technical.ly the company is in the business of “making what’s happening in cities transparent.” Specifically, AreaProbe helps clients “track real estate and infrastructure developments,” enabling them to see what’s happening and also who is involved.

AreaProbe takes census data and city data and housing association data and development data and more and uses it all to paint a picture of what’s happening in a neighborhood, a city, a region.

The company also fills an information-sharing role between the various players in the development space — the lenders and contractors and developers and owners and more. AreaProbe offers the kind of who’s-who information that can lead to partnerships down the road. In this, “it’s kind of like Match.com,” Faustin said.

For now, AreaProbe is only operating in the DMV area. But of course the team would like to expand when sustainable, and the money and mentoring on offer from Comcast would undoubtedly be helpful in this expansion.

Public voting in the Innovations 4 Entrepreneurs competition is live through May 13 — dig into AreaProbe’s application, and place your votes, here.

Homegrown coworking chain cove raises $3.4 million

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D.C.-grown coworking chain cove has raised $3.4 million, DC Inno reported on Thursday.

The two-year-old company also announced the hire of Nicholas Stafford, a former LivingSocial VP, as COO. Cove raised a $2.8 million Series A in May of last year.

According to his DC Inno interview, cove CEO Adam Segal views the $3.4 million convertible round as just the beginning. He said the company intends to raise more in the fall as it looks toward expansion in new cities next year.

Cove currently has nine locations in the DMV area and two in Boston. Another two locations in Boston are slated to open soon.

Coworking options and locations just keep multiplying in D.C. (and other East Coast cities).

WeWork is opening yet another new location near U Street “soon,” and MakeOffices has a “flagship” space in Clarendon in the works. Meanwhile Reston-based Refraction celebrated the grand opening of a bunch more square footage on Thursday — the company has doubled its available space to 23,000 square feet.

And as for something even less traditional, Croissant recently launched in D.C. as a go-to for people who want to experiment with a bunch of different coworking spaces. As the pièce de résistance, of course, there’s always yoga coworking.

Eastern Foundry incubator to open second location

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After launching a first space in Crystal City in December 2014Eastern Foundry, the incubator for small government contractors, is branching out.

According to the Washington Business Journal, the company has signed a lease on a space in Rosslyn — a location already listed on the incubator’s website. Apparently the company has been looking for a while, and the new space is very much in demand. Eastern Foundry already has startups committed to filling about half of the forthcoming floor at 1100 Wilson Blvd.

“One of the things about having been at occupancy for so long in Crystal City is we built a nice waiting list,” founder and CEO Geoff Orazem told WBJ.

The new space will have 43 offices and coworking space for 100, according to the report. The incubator’s current space at 81 members, according to a press release.


ServiceWhale home improvement platform expands to DC

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In March 2015 an online marketplace for home improvement jobs launched in Trevose, Pa., with Philly as its home market. Now, ServiceWhale has expanded its services to D.C.

The idea behind ServiceWhale, which already operates in New York in addition to Philly, is simple: there should be an easier way for homeowners to find the best deal among contractors willing to take on home improvement projects.

Using an online marketplace-style interface that the company likes to compare to Amazon, customers can simply enter a ZIP code and answer some questions about their job to get quotes from local vendors. Long gone are the days of hours spent searching and calling around, looking for a good deal.

What’s more, the service is free for homeowners. Contractors, on the other hand, pay a 10 percent commission when they book a job through ServiceWhale.

D.C. is just one of ServiceWhale’s new cities — the company also announced its expansion to Boston, Oklahoma City and Denver at the same time.

ServiceWhale has raised $2.5 million to date, and, as Technical.ly Philly has previously reported, splits its team of 15 between a marketing and sales team in Trevose and a tech team in Russia.

This new startup wants to help you make your pop-up dreams a reality

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A small clothing company holds a trunk show at a hair salon. A yoga teacher, looking to widen her client base, holds a pop-up class in a new neighborhood. An Etsy shop-owner gets to (affordably) showcase his products in a physical space, meeting new potential clients in the process.

Meet Poppir, the new D.C.-based company that wants to make all these scenarios a reality, all over the country.

Poppir is a platform for listing underutilized commercial real estate that could be used for a pop-up of some kind — a restaurant, event, art show, yoga class or meeting. The list goes on. It’s a two-sided marketplace — one side facing property owners or existing businesses that want to make a little extra money on their space and the other facing the entrepreneurial creator who wants to hold some sort of short-term event.

The platform is free for both parties to list a space or browse open spaces — Poppir makes a commission on bookings.

Cofounder and CMO Derek Nickerson told Technical.ly that Poppir grew out of a conversation he had with a friend-turned-cofounder on the rooftop of the Elevation apartment building in NoMa. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an Airbnb for art studios, this friend said. For his part Nickerson thought this sounded maybe a little too niche, but, he said, “I saw where he was headed and kinda expanded on that.”

Poppir launched on June 1, but it was a soft launch without a lot of advertising because, Nickerson said, “we don’t want a surge of users right away.” Rather, he’d like the company to grow slowly at first, fixing bugs and incorporating user feedback. Poppir currently lists spaces in the D.C. metro area, plus a few here and there in New York City and Houston, Texas. Nickerson said the goal is to have a strong presence in D.C. and Baltimore by the end of the summer.

The company has identified four different types of pop-ups, and seeks to cater spaces to suit each. First there’s a Classic Pop that takes place in a traditional retail storefront. A Flash Pop takes place in an event space — think hotel rooftop or club during the day. A Share Pop is where a pop-up comes into a space that is already being utilized by an existing business — the trunk show in a hair salon example is a good one. And finally a Work Pop is, as the name suggests, space rented for the purpose of internal company business.

The final type of pop-up is a more crowded marketplace — this is the type of role coworking spaces fill or even SwingSpace, another D.C.-based company Technical.ly profiled earlier this year. But the other types of pop-ups are a bit different. And while there is competition in the short-term event space finding market, Nickerson seems to believe that the industry will grow and Poppir is poised to be a part of that.

Poppir is currently bootstrapped and boasts what Nickerson described as a very diverse team of 12 employees. And the small, young company has a lot more ideas about how to move forward. In one concept the company would keep track of local events and festivals and market space that is available for a pop-up in the surrounding area — this way companies would get the added value of extra foot traffic. Another idea is to market pop-ups to shopping malls — maybe a little bit of scarcity could revitalize the shopping mall industry.

It sounds like they’re just getting started.

Evan Burfield just moved across the river to Crystal City

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1776 cofounder and co-CEO Evan Burfield has moved to Crystal City, the Washington Business Journal reports. The #dctech figure traded his two bedroom Logan Circle condo for a $1.6 million, five-bedroom house in the Aurora Highlands neighborhood — about a mile from 1776’s Crystal City location.

Evan Burfield. (Photo via Linkedin)

Evan Burfield. (Photo via Linkedin)

So why is this a big deal?

Realistically, it’s probably not. Burfield can cite any number of practical reasons for the move, like, as he told WBJ, having a lawn for his young daughter. “It’s like anything else,” he said. “You go through different phases in life, and we’re in a different stage in life.”

Seen a different way, though, the move is a further endorsement of the potential of Crystal City as a hub (the first endorsement being 1776’s expansion across the river). According to the WBJ, Burfield compares Crystal City today with the 14th Street corridor when he first moved to Logan Circle eight years ago.

This is a flattering comparison. Because while Crystal City has been working hard to up its own cool factor with new restaurants and tech offices and that WeWork/WeLive location, it’s still got a ways to go to vibrancy:

Burfield isn’t deaf to this perspective, either. “If you had said five years ago we would be excited to be moving into the Crystal City area, I would have looked at you quizzically,” he told WBJ. “But Crystal City has come a long way in a short period of time.”

Burfield, it seems, wants to be around to see what happens next.

How Title III of the JOBS Act helped Fundrise ‘democratize real estate’

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When Dupont-based Fundrise first launched in 2012, the company’s mission was to “democratize” real estate investing — to “give everyone the opportunity to invest directly in high quality real estate.”

The company’s tech-driven model allowed for a significant departure from the old school methods of real estate investing, but there was a rub — Fundrise’s democracy had imposed legal limits. That’s because, back in 2012, Fundrise couldn’t actually give “everyone” the same investment opportunity. Under the SEC rules of the time, any individual investing with Fundrise needed to be an “accredited investor” — an individual with a net worth of $1 million or $200,000 in annual income. That’s a pretty limited democracy.

But even back in 2012 this was starting to change. That year President Barack Obama signed the JOBS Act, Title III of which opens up equity crowdfunding to non-accredited investors. And finally, on May 16, 2016, that section of the Act was implemented by the SEC. “We’ve been really excited about it,” Kendall Davis, investment associate at Fundrise, told Technical.ly.

And no wonder — Title III vastly expands the number of potential investors that Fundrise has access to, and throws some legitimacy behind their mission to serve “everyone.” Anyone who is a U.S. resident over the age of 18 can invest via Fundrise for as little as $1,000. There are over 100,000 users on the site, Davis said.

There are still some limitations, though. For example, each Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT or eREIT as Fundrise calls them) that the company sets up has a $50 million cap. According to Davis, demand is much higher than this. Fundrise has chosen to get around this by increasing the number of eREITs they have available — launching five different options since November 2015.

The new regulations also mean more SEC paperwork, which translates to higher legal costs. But overall, Davis said, “this is certainly a step forward.”

MakeOffices is opening a new location on K Street

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MakeOffices, the D.C.-born brand of coworking spaces, announced on Wednesday that the company will open a new location in the District proper. The new space is at 1015 15th St. NW — in other words, smack in the middle of the “power corridor” that is K Street.

“K Street is at the center of business in Washington DC, where powerful change is made,” MakeOffices CEO Raymond Rahbar said in a statement. “MakeOffices’ K Street coworking community will be a place where Washington insiders and disruptors alike can make their mark.”

The office will span two floors and 35,000 square feet, and will have 112 offices the biggest of which accommodates 13 desks. Rahbar says that makes it just a bit smaller than the company’s flagship Clarendon location. Additionally, an open kitchen and events space will be able to host events with 100 plus attendees. The location, joining MakeOffices outposts in Dupont, Rosslyn, Bethesda, Tysons, Reston Town Center and Clarendon (not to mention Philly and Chicago), will open Dec. 5.

(Of note: Expansion plans in Philly have been rocky, our sister site recently reported.)

Coworking on K Street, by at least some approximations, shows the steady march of this concept toward the mainstream. K Street is not known as a center for D.C.’s creative economy — rather it’s where lawyers and lobbyists and think-tank workers reign. And this is precisely the kind of clientele that MakeOffices (and competitors WeWork and cove, both of which also have K Street locations) is trying to lure. The question is,  do “collaborative workspaces and networking communities” appeal in these more traditional D.C. industries?

In a conversation with Technical.ly, Rahbar said he expects to see the location appealing to members who are bridging the gap between the creative, startup worlds and the government, think tank and lobbying worlds. Think business-to-government startups or designers working on federal projects.

“You don’t go to K and 15th unless you’re really ready to lay down your roots in that D.C. power corridor,” he said.

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