It is the latest building to go under development for tech tenants in Washington's resurgent NoMa corridor, a roughly triangular area so-called for being north of Massachusetts Avenue. Qwest, MCI, XM Satellite Radio and others have moved into the area already, but few have paid such a price.

The transactions are valued at more than $64 million, and involve "quadruple net" rents of about $30/sf, says Andrew Pellman, project manager for Bristol, a San Francisco-based real estate investment and development firm. In addition to taxes, maintenance, insurance-- the usual element of a triple net lease--the tenants will also pay for roof maintenance, because they keep so much equipment there, he says. That's about $15 per sf more than the first tenant that signed in the area at 1500 Eckington Place, and about $5 per sf more than other rents quoted in the area now.

The 440,000-sf site is the second that Bristol has master-planned as a telecommunications center, after Hudson Square Telecom Center, a New York site that was the first master-planned telecommuncations center in the country. The plans are important. Not only did they help Bristol line up a higher rent--they give it room to expand power and fiber-optic communication capacity as tenants grow.