1255 23rd Street NW Office-to-Residential Conversion, West End, Washington, D.C.

Another Washington office building is headed for residential. Jemal Real Estate and DivcoWest, with JLS Capital, formed a joint venture in early October 2026 to convert 1255 23rd Street NW, a 342,000-square-foot office building in the West End, into roughly 323 apartments. Madison Realty Capital supplied a $40 million loan for acquisition and predevelopment.

The eight-story building dates to 1982. It sits a few blocks from the Foggy Bottom-GWU Metro station, between Georgetown, George Washington University and Dupont Circle. DivcoWest owns the property and will keep an equity stake.

Project Scope

Plans call for about 323 units, up to 36 of them affordable. Roughly 22,000 square feet of ground-floor retail stays, and the building keeps 257 covered parking spaces. FILLAT+ Architecture is the architect and CBG Building Company is the general contractor. No construction schedule or total budget has been released, and the partners say more details will follow as plans advance.

Norman Jemal, senior managing principal at Douglas Development, launched Jemal Real Estate in late 2025 to chase exactly this kind of deal. He says the building has “the geometry and bones” for residential. His firm has already turned an office and mixed-use property in Syracuse, N.Y., into 57 apartments and a 20-story Richmond, Va., office tower into 288 apartments and 210 hotel rooms.

Why It Matters

D.C. has become one of the country’s busiest conversion markets. Aviator House in Dupont Circle opened in mid-October as the first project backed by the city’s Housing in Downtown abatement, and The Geneva in Kalorama is under construction. 1255 23rd Street adds a West End building to that pipeline.

The hard part will be the floor plate. Spread 342,000 square feet across eight stories and you get roughly 40,000 square feet a floor, which is deep for apartments. Expect the design to answer that with a courtyard cut, interior amenity space or bigger units wrapped around the core. Height limits in Washington tend to produce exactly this kind of wide, low office stock, so how FILLAT+ solves it matters beyond one address.

The $40 million only covers acquisition and predevelopment. Construction financing is the next test, and its size and terms will say a lot about how lenders price a 323-unit conversion in a submarket full of aging office space.

Project Team & Details