Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Mark Biffert - Oppenheimer & Co.
Mark Biffert - Oppenheimer & Co.
Skip, I was wondering if you could comment on the general traffic patterns you’re seeing in the properties in terms of the office retail industrial and just go through some of the larger vacancies that you have in terms of timing when you expect to see more people come in and also I noticed that the University or George Washington University fell off your top list of tenants? Can you just explain that?
Skip McKenzie
Go to the first part first. I would say sort of region wide that as I mentioned in my opening comments, leasing velocity is down fairly dramatically, depending which submarket you want to address, I would say you could look at almost negative absorption, certainly year-to-date on an aggregate basis throughout the region with Maryland being the weakest of the submarkets.
As it relates specifically to our portfolio, we have a fairly large vacancy at our One Central Plaza building, which is right around the corner from our headquarters here and that particular asset, I’ll be quite honest with you and all of Montgomery County traffic has been soft.
Over Northern Virginia, the biggest vacancy we have had over there has been Dulles Station, which as you know we leased to IBM and the other vacancy in that building, which is small, we’ve made pretty good progress leasing up. So other than that we don’t have any huge vacancies in our office portfolio in the suburbs.
Downtown, we have almost a four floor at 2000 M Street which to be quite honestly that we’ve been disappointed in the activity on that space. We anticipated that would be leased by this time, when we did our budgets a year ago and to be quite honest with you. The activity there has been disappointing. The other four floor vacancy we have in the district, we have very good activity on, and I would expect a transaction fairly imminently on that.
Let me talk about the retail portfolio, because that I would say is believe it or not, one of the signs of fairly good progress. At some of the larger boxes that we have, not that we have very many, but we have a former Circuit City box out in the Hagerstown property, and it appears that we’re very close to a transaction there and I would anticipate making an announcement in the fourth quarter for progress on that specific vacancy, that’s really the only large retail vacancy that we have.
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