Prudential Real Estate's 600K SF office building at 1800 M St. NW is now about 95% leased.

The building's newest tenant is the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which signed a 25K SF lease in early March. Cushman & Wakefield's Bobby Schwartz, James Collins and Mark Sullivan represented the landlord, while Ezra Cos.' Robert Katz repped the tenant.

AFPM is leaving another central business district office at 1667 K St. NW, where they occupied 15,657 SF. Katz said the company could not get enough space in that building to keep up with its expansion so it sought out buildings with larger floor plates.

The building previously lost its anchor tenant, the Department of Agriculture, in 2012 and underwent a roughly $25M renovation the following year.

Prudential experienced solid leasing activity after the renovation, with the Berkley Research Group signing for 60K SF in 2013 and more recently with The Segal Group taking 29K SF. The renovation allowed Prudential not only to fill the space, but to increase rents from the Class-B range to the Class-A range.

"What they did is a good case study for being able to take a B building and reposition it to an A building," Schwartz said. "I think you’re going to see several more of these types of repositionings occurring in the CBD."