Republik Coffee Bar was founded out of frustration.

Elan Irving, the company’s director of operations, said when the founders of the coffee bar were looking for premium coffee options in the area, they were underwhelmed. Recently, the coffee shop that started one year ago in Arlington has branched out into Tysons.

The Republik Coffee Bar in Tysons is located on the ground floor of the mixed-use Highgate (7915 Jones Branch Drive) just east of Tysons Galleria. It opened in June.

“We were looking for a place to enjoy premium coffee served in an inviting environment staffed by friendly baristas with a pleasant ambiance,” said Irving. “Surprisingly, there are very few places that embody all of these qualities, so we decided to provide such space for like minded coffee lovers.”

Irving said the largest issue that faced the burgeoning company initially was finding a price balance.

“One of the challenges is to keep prices low without sacrificing on the quality of the product as well as keeping a staff of highly qualified baristas,” said Irving. “We were always in pursuit of better coffee, better brewing methods, and very competitive prices. We don’t believe in charging $5 for a six-ounce cappuccino.”

Republik Coffee Bar is in the midst of an aggressive expansion campaign. In six months, Republik plans to open two more locations inside D.C. and eventually another in Fairfax County.

“If you are afraid of taking calculated risks, you shouldn’t be in business of investing in new businesses,” said Irving. “This is also true in our business. We are very confident in our concept and very happy to see the response we received in Ballston. This has encouraged us to expand into other locations.”

For now, Republik Coffee Bar is local, but the company has much larger ambitions if the continued regional launches go well.

“Our short term goals are establish our brand into a very respectable local brand in the D.C. metro area,” Irving said. “If we are successful in achieving this, we will continue to expand regionally and then one day, nationally.”

Hopefully, the firefighters of Station 29 will never have to use their familiarity with new high-rise buildings across Tysons. But just in case, the crew has been spending the last few weeks exploring the unfinished interiors of Tysons’ tallest structures.

Captain David Bentley from Station 29 said it’s useful for firefighters to take a look inside the buildings before the drywall and the finishing touches are added to see how the buildings are structured and to understand the layout.

“If there’s an emergency, when it’s finished or during construction, this way it will be easier for us to get to patients,” said Bentley. “We need to know how the floors are made, what the ceiling looks like, and what’s between the drywall.”

At The Boro, for example, Bentley said they’re using aluminum studs in the walls while many smaller construction projects use wood. While wood burns when exposed to direct flame, or can smolder and fail over time, Bentley said aluminum studs fail quicker because they start to warp when exposed to intense heat. Bentley said information like that helps firefighters understand how much time they have to continue working to extinguish a fire safely or rescue people from the building.

One of the most interesting buildings Bentley said they visited was the new 31-story Capital One tower, the tallest building in the greater Washington area.

“It’s an absolutely amazing building,” said Bentley. “The sheer number of people working there, elevators, and security, it’s all absolutely amazing… Some of these bigger [buildings have fire pumps that run up to the top floor, and the size and amount of these pumps are quite large and they have to have a backup in case they fail. They have five massive diesel generators the size of cruise ship engines to keep the place running.”

One of the unique features of the new Capital One building is a fire suppression device that rolls over the escalators like a conveyer belt and seals them off, which both stops the fire from spreading to higher floors but also cuts off a route of ingress or egress for those needing to get to or away from the fire.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Bentley. “It would definitely cut off a route, whether we need to go up or down, but it’s meant to stop vertical fire spreads. There are plenty of other exits in that building and I’m sure security has pre-plans, but that’s definitely a unique challenge.”

Bentley said the sheer verticality of these buildings presents a challenge as well. While Bentley says firefighters can respond to most emergencies in downtown Tysons in five minutes, getting the right equipment to the right floor can take twice as long. Once inside, maneuvering around the building in an emergency situation can be difficult as well, as evidenced by the dramatic rescue via construction crane last month.

“We practice a lot,” said Bentley. “We have drills once a week on high-rise operations. We assign people on different apparatus to different tasks. Paramedics will grab one length of hose to take to the fire floor. The firefighter on the right side of the engine will grab another section of hose. I’ll grab the officer’s bag, which has tools to hook into pipes. This way we can take any hose down any hallway to get to the fire.”

Bentley says the crew of Station 29 visited the Boro (8301 Greensboro Drive) and the Capital One building (1600 Capital One Blvd) and older buildings like Kaiser Permanente’s Tysons Corner Medical Facility (8008 Westpark Drive) and Rotunda Apartments (8352 Greensboro Drive).

Bentley said the firefighters also travelled to low rise buildings, like Cava and Honeygrow in Pike 7 Plaza, to familiarize crews with the new small developments he says are popping up all over.

Photos via Twitter

This regularly-scheduled sponsored Q&A column is written by Val Sotillo, Northern Virginia-based Realtor and Falls Church resident. Please submit your questions to her via email for response in future columns. Enjoy!

Question: We are ready to buy a house in the upcoming months. Should we wait until spring to start house hunting or should we consider buying a house during the winter?

Answer: Winter can be a great time to buy a house! Not only do you get to test that the heating system works well, but buyers tend to have the upper hand over sellers in the negotiations. There will be fewer buyers in competition during the winter, less chances of multiple offers for the same property and the low demand may work in your favor.

Sellers who have their homes on the market during the winter may be more motivated to negotiate and willing to make a deal. In Northern Virginia, the winter market generally runs from November through January and is defined by increased buyer leverage, less contract activity and fewer new listings.

Keep An Open Mind And Open Schedule

You can buy in the winter as long as you keep an open mind.

Landscaping is not very colorful during the cold months, and depending on the weather you may not be able to perform an inspection in certain areas of the house (i.e. an inspector won’t go on an icy, dangerous roof), but you can make a list of those items and get them inspected as soon as the weather allows it.

Also, you will need to be flexible with time given that holidays, less daylight hours, and extreme weather may delay property access, inspections, title work, appraisal, etc. But hey, I like to believe that people are nicer during the holidays and everyone is willing to work it out!

Buy In The Fall/Winter If…

• You’re a bargain hunter
• What you like is priced just outside of your budget
• There is a regular supply of homes you like
• You have a flexible schedule

Wait For The Spring/Summer If…

• You have specific, hard-to-find criteria
• You value the perfect home over a great deal
• Your purchase is contingent on selling your current home (requires additional conversation)
• If you’re moving to a new school district and don’t want to move your kids in the middle of the school year

It’s Harder To Find What You Want

But, that doesn’t mean you can’t find something great in the winter. It will just take a little more effort. The chart below shows the number of newly listed homes in Northern Virginia each month, for the past three years. You will see that the number of newly listed homes for sale is significantly lower from November through January.

Pickings Are Slimmer But The Prices Are Too

The table below is made up of sales in Tysons, Mclean, Vienna, Northern Falls Church and Eastern Fairfax from 2013-2017, except for new construction, and is based on the month properties went under contract, not the month they actually sold (homes generally sell 30-60 days after they go under contract). The cells highlighted in green are the most favorable for buyers. Here are some key highlights from the data table:

• Buyers have the most negotiation leverage in December
• Seasonality has a much lower impact on condos than it does single-family homes and townhouses
• The market turns favorable for buyers starting in August and usually continues that trend until January/February (tends to be weather-dependent)

So, which season is the best for home buying? The best time to buy a house really depends on what makes the most sense for your situation. If you’re on the fence about buying this winter or not sure if you have time to prepare yourself to make a purchase, send me an email at [email protected] to discuss your options and put a strategy in place.

If you’d like a question answered in my weekly column, please send an email to [email protected]. I hope to hear from you soon.

Val Sotillo is a licensed Realtor in Virginia, Washington DC, and Maryland with Real Living At Home, 2420 Wilson Blvd #101 Arlington, VA 22201, 703-390-9460.

Every week the Eli Residential Group scours our network for off-market and pre-market homes to give home buyers and investors access to properties they can’t find anywhere else online. If you are interested in a property you see here or have specific needs you cannot find on the market, please reach out to us at [email protected] to talk to a real person, not an automated response system.

If you are a homeowner, investor, builder or agent who would like your off-market or pre-market property featured for a half million local readers on PoPville, ARLnow or Tysons Reporter, please email us at [email protected].

Downtown McLean Townhouse
McLean Crest Community

Description: 3 BR/4.5 BA/2,400 sq. ft. townhouse with 2-car garage, built in 2006 in McLean Crest community. Walk to downtown McLean shops and restaurants. Within Franklin Sherman ES, Longfellow MS, and McLean HS boundaries. Currently tenant occupied with option to purchase with tenant or purchase at end of lease.
Price: Mid $900’s

To view all of our off-market or pre-market properties, visit the off-market section of our website. We add new properties every week.

The Eli Residential Group is a real estate team with RLAH Real Estate, (703) 390-9460, operating in Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Maryland. Contact the team directly at [email protected].

No wallet? No problem.

With Yombu, everything from financial transactions to gym access is at your fingertip. Now, this Tysons company is starting to branch out across the country.

Yombu is a tech startup based out of MakeOffices in Tysons. The company lets customers of a business confirm their identity for something like purchasing an item or signing into a membership with only a fingerprint scan.

“We want to be the way people pay and the way people engage so you don’t need anything other than you,” said Joe Falit, one of the two co-founders of Yombu.

Yombu started in Northern Virginia, but has since expanded into D.C. and Maryland. Falit said the company is focused on gradually building into more cities and building locally-centered networks.

Yombu’s new deal with gym software company Motionsoft means that the company is about to receive a major boost in users as it spreads to 26 gyms across the country.

Yombu started one year ago with zero users. Today, they are at 15,000, which is 5,000 more than their initial goal for 2018.

The company expands its user-base through two types of markets.

The first is through merchants or “quick-serve” transactions, like coffee shops or dry cleaners. In a location like this, a customer can authenticate their fingerprint once as they pay with a card, and the card will be linked with that print. Things like rewards traditionally tracked through punch cards can also be tracked through Yombu.

Getting merchants on board can be difficult. Falit said many they talk to initially say that credits cards work fast enough. But once shown how much faster lines can move and how much more consistent the rewards programs can be with a fingerprint scan, they usually sign up.

The second type of market is membership. Yombu is used to sign in or out of a membership area, like a gym, and while Falit said the company started with mostly quick-serve transactions, they’re finding membership to be the much more lucrative use of the technology.

“If you’re a gym and you now use Yombu to have membership through finger, you’re basically making everyone sign up,” said Falit. “We see these memberships as hubs. At coffee shops, we might get 20 percent of people there to sign up. But at the gym, we get 100 percent of people to sign up.”

As Yombu prepares to launch in Philadelphia soon and in gyms across the country, back at home in Tysons the program is starting to become more and more commonplace.

Yombu is currently being used in 56 locations throughout the D.C. area — 30 merchant locations and 26 gyms. On one rainy day along a few weeks ago, Falit watched as 325 new users signed up for the program as they flocked into coffee shops throughout the region, all of them paying for their coffee with a single touch.

Photo via Yombu

It’s no secret that Tysons is growing.

The skyline is filled with construction cranes and seemingly every week there’s an announcement of a new restaurant or business moving into the area. But as Tysons grows, it also faces infrastructure challenges and threats from neighbors.

Professor Stephen Fuller, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, said that Tysons is finally starting to recover from the 2013 budget sequestration. Fuller said the sequester had a more damaging impact on the region than the 2008 recession, as the type of contracting that fills Tysons office space was cut by 15 percent.

Today, Tysons is still left with 15 percent office vacancy, which Fuller said puts the market on about even footing with Arlington. Rosslyn and Crystal City were both particularly hard hit by contracting cuts that left sweeping vacancies along the Metro corridor.

But Fuller noted that both Tysons and Arlington have comparative strengths and weaknesses that make them very different marketplaces.

“Arlington has old office spaces with bad floor plans,” said Fuller. “That’s sending people out to Tysons, which has newer office space.”

Gerald Gordon, who will soon be retiring as President and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, said that the county essentially gave a blank check to developers for density near Metro stations, which has helped incentivize new construction.

“The county allowed for unlimited density in a quarter mile radius of each station,” said Gordon. “We have these really tall buildings and we’re going to see a lot of new office space. Some of the older buildings are coming down, being replaced by more floors to be a lot of office spaces.”

But older office space is also one of Arlington’s greatest strengths, as Fuller said the outdated office spaces in Arlington are also often less expensive than the new office suites in Tysons where speculation has sent land prices skyrocketing.

Another of Arlington’s strengths, according to Fuller, is the culture and vibrancy that Tysons mostly lacks.

“When Amazon was looking at Northern Virginia, they were looking at Crystal City, not Tysons,” said Fuller. “Tysons just doesn’t offer lifestyle that they’re looking for.”

Fuller said the new apartment buildings and lifestyle-supporting commercial retail coming into Tysons is a good sign that Tysons is working towards that vitality, but Fuller said bringing that kind of culture is going to take two key ingredients: walkability and time.

“It’s about the distance between buildings, it isn’t walkable,” said Fuller. “Some internal circulation system will be required. It’s been long discussed, but I haven’t seen any yet. The Capital One complex, with the headquarters expansion, is going to make that a node that people are going to want to get to.”

Gordon similarly said transportation is one of Tysons greatest challenges over the next few years, but that stepping up public transportation in Tysons can help alleviate some of the areas traffic woes.

Most importantly, Fuller said it’s going to take time to organically build vibrancy and economic stability in Tysons.

“There’s work to be done, but they have to be patient,” said Fuller. “They’re delivering spaces faster than the economy is growing. The economy has picked up, 2017 was a much better year for the kinds of businesses that look at Tysons, but you can’t just snap your fingers and make it all happen.”

While Tysons and Arlington compete for office tenants and vibrancy, Professor Frank Shafroth, director of the Center for State and Local Leadership at George Mason University, said it’s important not to ignore Washington, D.C.’s increasing appeal for developers.

“Northern Virginia has traditionally, as part of the Washington metro region, been tied to the nation’s capitol,” said Shafroth. “Significantly reduced violent crime in D.C. has made the District far more attractive to millennials, decreasing the pressure for young families to want to move to the suburbs and deal with vicious commutes.”

This regularly-scheduled sponsored Q&A column is written by Val Sotillo, Northern Virginia-based Realtor and Falls Church resident. Please submit your questions to her via email for response in future columns. Enjoy!

Welcome to our neighborhood real estate blog! I’m very excited to be part of this community and cover all sorts of topics regarding residential real estate and the market place. I’m here to answer your questions in a very honest, informative and hopefully fun way (who says real estate is boring!?).

Before we get started with our first Q&A, a bit about me — I moved from Peru to the D.C. area in 2004 and I’ve been in property management and real estate ever since. Falls Church resident, dog and cat lover, Redskins fan, new restaurant explorer and Zumba instructor. Some of my favorite places near Tysons:

• Casual Restaurant: Taco Bamba
• Happy Hour: Sea Pearl
• Dog friendly patio: Tysons Biergarten
• Date night spot: Nostos
• Music venue: Jammin Java

I have been collecting some great questions that I plan to answer over the coming weeks, and I can’t wait to hear yours also. If you’d like a question answered in my weekly column, please send an email to [email protected]. I hope to hear from you soon.

Val Sotillo is a licensed Realtor in Virginia, Washington D.C. and Maryland with Real Living At Home, 2420 Wilson Blvd #101 Arlington, VA 22201, 703-390-9460.

This is a sponsored column by attorneys John Berry and Kimberly Berry of Berry & Berry, PLLC, an employment and labor law firm located in Northern Virginia that specializes in federal employee, security clearance, retirement and private sector employee matters.

By John V. Berry, Esq.

One of the most evolving areas of employment law today is how off-duty social media use is increasingly affecting employees and their employment. One of the most common misconceptions about employee off-duty social media use is that it is somehow protected by law and cannot subject an employee to discipline. In particular, there is a belief that the First Amendment protects speech made outside of work on social media.

This isn’t the case. The First Amendment generally does not protect this type of speech for private sector employees and only rarely does for public sector employees.

Recent Examples in the News

Some recent examples of the connection between social media and employment have made the news recently. In one example, a private school administrator was placed on suspension for making inappropriate comments to Attorney Michael Avenatti on Twitter. A second example involved a Dean at Catholic University who this week was suspended for making comments about a female complainant related to the Kavanaugh U.S. Senate Supreme Court proceedings on social media.

Few Protections for Employee Use of Social Media

We have seen similar kinds of social media use issues arise in workplace termination cases far more frequently these days. The use of social media by employees is generally not protected by the First Amendment which only protects individuals from government action, not actions of private employers.

Employees can be terminated for social media speech even if it was created with their private accounts and prepared after work hours. Many companies are increasingly receiving complaints about employees who make threatening or inappropriate comments on Facebook, Twitter or other social media outlets.

As a result, many employers are then taking disciplinary action against these same employees. As the law on social media evolves we may see some protections develop where an employer takes discriminatory action for a post or violates other state and federal laws.

However, right now there is little in the way of protections for employment actions taken due to social media postings.

As easy as it is for an individual to express an inappropriate comment on social media in a moment of frustration it is just as easy for someone who sees the comment to report it to an employer.

In this evolving world of social media and employment law, it is generally a good idea for employees to understand the thin line that exists between posting on social media in a moment of frustration and an employer taking disciplinary action against them.

Conclusion

When facing employment or wrongful termination issues in Virginia it is important to obtain the advice of and representation of an attorney.  Our law firm advises and represents individuals in wrongful termination matters in Virginia and other jurisdictions. We can be contacted at www.berrylegal.com or by telephone at 703-668-0070.

Please also visit and like us on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

(Updated at 4:30) — The Boro, a mixed-use complex being built near the Greensboro Metro station, has topped out.

Caroline Flax, senior analyst for site developer The Meridian Group, said the complex is as tall as it’s going to get, so it’s time for a review of the project and where it stands.

The project is broken into five lettered sections filling the block southeast of the Leesburg Pike and Westpark Drive intersection. The area is just west of the Tysons Galleria mall.

Furthest along is Block C, a grouping of two major buildings and a much smaller kiosk. A third building has been approved for the block but has not begun construction. The largest occupants of Block C are the Showplace ICON movie theater and a 437,000 square-foot office building. The kiosk in the one acre park will be where Bluestone Lane, an Australian-inspired coffee chain, will be opening their first Virginia location.

Flax said this side of the project is expected to be completed by the end of this year. In the first two quarters of 2019, Tysons Reporter was told, the office tenants will begin to move into Block C.

Meanwhile, to the northwest of Block C, the skeleton of Block A has been completed. Block A is the primarily residential area of the complex. In August, Flax said the tall towers of Block A, the 27-story apartment “Rise” tower and the 25-story luxury condominium “Verse” tower, had all of their floors poured into place. Work is now beginning on the facades and the interior of the buildings.

A 69,000 square-foot Whole Foods will occupy the base of the northern point of Block A, at the corner of Greensboro Drive and Westpark Drive.

Block B of the project, southwest of Block A, is The Loft. At five-stories tall, The Loft dwarfed by its northern residential neighbors. But the 77,000 square-foot building will stretch along the length of the new street Boro Place and hold two floors of retail and three stories of offices above that.

“Boro Place is the retail spine of The Boro,” said Flax.

Several restaurants are already signed to move into Blocks A and B, including:

• Fish Taco, a DC based taco chain
• Tasty Kabob, the first brick-and-mortar location for a popular local food truck
• Flower Child, a fast-casual restaurant specializing in healthy food
• North Italia, an Italian restaurant specializing in handmade pizzas and pasta
• Tropical Smoothie Cafe, a national smoothie chain

Taylor Gourmet had been signed to move into the area as well, but the chain filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy at the end of September and closed all locations. Flax said no decision on a new occupant has been finalized but that there are several prospects for the location under consideration.

Today, information technology departments are largely reactive — called to fix problems after they happen. But the Tysons startup TaskFit.io has developed artificial intelligence tech that, if it catches on, could supplement if not replace the help desk entirely.

TaskFit.io is an IT automation software platform that can be installed onto a laptop, server, or edge device (like routers) to gather metrics on that device and help fix it when an issue occurs.

TaskFit.io’s AI programs are constantly collecting data as the system is running and adapting to meet problems that come up. Problems can be identified and remedied before the user even recognizes that one exists.

“When you have an issue with your laptop, you call support,” said Tim Marcinowski, co-founder of TaskFit.io. “Your internet goes down and you’re on the phone. We’re the first line of defense for support for organizations through our agents, which are AI that can learn based on data we collect and take action before the user has to report it to support.”

Marcinowski said that for many companies, IT is outsourced. This can work for a smaller company just getting started, but Macinowski said problem comes when the companies start to expand and starts to outgrow their IT service.

“There’s a number you can point to [in each business], where if they bring on X amount of customers, they need X amount of people supporting those activities,” said Marcinowski.

TaskFit.io is currently a small company, based in the Tysons WeWork coworking space. Marcinowski and co-founder Peter Fraedrich run the technical side of the company, along with two advisors and three or four contractors.

“We haven’t taken any investments and have been gaining revenue since month one,” said Marcinowski. “We started on our own with our own money and have been doing okay for right now. Eventually we will raise early stage capital within the year.”

Two started in April with $90,000 of the two founders’ own money. The company has $40,000 in recurring annual revenue, according to Marcinowski, who hopes to push that to $100,000 by the end of the year.

Currently, TaskFit.io has three paying customers and four pilot projects. The pilot projects are unpaid but allow the company to gain insights into the program working in action and allow them to continue developing abilities.

“These companies that are early adopters got free software,” said Marcinowski, “but we’re going to bug you and ask you a lot of questions. Things may break, but we’ll work to get them fixed.”

Like many startups, TaskFit.io has pivoted its focus over time. Early on, Marcinowski says they were originally interested in competing with Google and Amazon to create the first real-time machine learning platform. That evolved into the company’s current platform, but even then product development has been an iterative process of shifting priorities and tough decisions.

According to Marcinowski, what managers said they really wanted was a tech tool to help them figure out what their employees were doing. While this could have been a profitable avenue, it didn’t fit with the founders’ vision for the company.

“We really didn’t want to be the watchdog of employees,” said Marcinowski. “We didn’t want to be that at all, and we didn’t care how much money we made. We aren’t used car salesmen, we wanted to build software that solves problems.”

Photo via TaskFit.io