Washington, DC · Maryland · Virginia
The Tenets of Where You Build
Office leasing and tenant representation for AI companies opening in Washington. We run the search, the lease, and all the buildout nobody warns you about.
Named for the word it sounds like.
TENET only ever represents tenants.
Four tenets, in the order the work happens.
Rent is usually the second biggest line on your P&L after payroll, and it is the one nobody on your team has done before. Your COO should not be learning what a TI allowance is on the fly.
We start from your hiring plan and your security requirements, not from whatever happens to be listed. If you will need a SCIF in eighteen months, that changes the building list today. If you just closed a B and the plan says double, that changes the term.
The face rate is the least interesting number in a lease. We work the TI allowance, free rent, escalations, the opex base year, and the expansion and termination rights that keep you from getting stuck when the plan changes. It will change.
Architect, GC, furniture, cabling, badge access, signage, permits. One schedule and one person holding it. Most brokers hand you keys and go quiet once the commission clears. We stay until your team is actually working in the space.
Critical dates do not manage themselves. We track your options, flag renewal windows before they close, and pick up the phone when a new contract or a new round blows up your headcount math.
Three kinds of client, with a lot of overlap between them.
Labs, applied AI teams, and the tooling companies around them opening a DC office. Usually chasing federal work, usually growing faster than a five-year term accounts for, and often needing something a standard office build does not cover: a secure room, a server closet with real power to it, a floor that can pass an inspection.
Governance, evals, and standards work. For these groups, walking distance to the Hill is not a preference, it is the job. Budgets are tight, board approval takes a cycle, and the space still has to be good enough to host a briefing.
Research institutes, think tanks, public-interest tech. The office has to work for heads-down work and for convening, and those two things want different floor plans.
Who you're dealing with.
Tenet exists because specialized brokers do better work. I know that because I have spent a decade being one.
My background is healthcare real estate. Not because medical office is glamorous, but because a tenant with an operatory, a lead-lined wall, and a state licensing inspection needs a broker who already knows what those cost and how long they take. A generalist learns it on your deal, on your schedule, with your money.
AI companies have their own version of that list. A SCIF instead of a lead-lined wall. A federal authorization instead of a state health inspection. Power and cooling in the server room instead of medical gas. Same problem, different vocabulary. Tenet is that approach pointed at a different industry.
So: which landlords will underwrite a company with two years of revenue and a big round behind it. What a SCIF does to your construction schedule and your budget. How to write expansion rights for a team that might triple and might not. Whether the building can actually give you the power you want in the server room, or whether that is a fight with the property manager.
None of it is exotic. It is just specific, and you learn it by doing it more than once.
Tenet operates as a division of Charles L. Feitel Company LLC, a Washington-area commercial real estate brokerage.
Chaz Feitel
Founder
I have brokered commercial real estate around Washington since 2013, mostly tenant representation and agency leasing in healthcare. I still do that work, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Tenet is the same playbook run for a different industry, started because the calls I was getting from that world were not being served well by anybody. Penn State, 2012. I live in Alexandria.
Representative engagements.
Tenant Representation — Capitol Hill
The Hill has very little small-tenant space and most of it never reaches the market. We worked it off-market, kept the convening and mission requirements in play alongside the economics, and closed five years at 5,000 feet in the location their work actually required.
Client name withheld at Tenet's discretion. Available on request.
Why Washington, and the three submarkets we spend the most time in.
Washington is where the rules get written. For a lot of AI companies that makes it the second office. For the institutions doing evals, standards, and oversight, it is the only one.
A DC address buys proximity to the agencies that will procure your product, the committees writing the rules you will live under, and people who have spent a career inside both. It is also a tenant's market right now. Concessions across the regional office market are still unusually generous, and a well-run search turns that into real money over a term.
Policy shops, nonprofits, and anyone whose work happens inside House and Senate offices. Very little small-tenant inventory and most of it never lists. You need someone working the phones.
Deep sublease inventory and walkable to the agencies and the Hill both. Where most first DC offices end up.
Across the river, with the Pentagon right there and a defense and gov-tech tenant base already in the buildings around you.
Every search starts with a call, not a listing sheet.
If you are opening a DC office, outgrowing one, or wondering whether the lease you signed still fits, start here.