Article Date: 7/17/2025
Gagan Marwaha’s two-year office building buying binge is now at four deals – and counting.
It’s the second deal for Marwaha in the office park, following his $5.75 million purchase last year of what was then known as Patriot Tower, which sits across the street and has since been renamed Marwaha Tower.
He’s likewise rebranded Gateway Centre II as Marwaha Tower II, as part of his strategy to show the market there’s a new owner on board.
While Marwaha has become known for mostly buying entirely empty office buildings around the region, his latest acquisition was already 77% occupied at the time of the purchase.
Marwaha said he had a two-fold strategy in deciding to buy Gateway Centre II, which sits at 100 Gateway Centre Parkway within eyeshot from his other building in the park.
“One, we wanted to practice economies of scale. It’s easy management because it’s right across the street,” Marwaha said, referring to Marwaha Tower I. “Second, if I don’t own the whole office park, I want to be the majority stakeholder of the office park.”
In addition to the two buildings, Marwaha also now owns a total of 12 acres of land in the park, including about 9 acres of parking lots and undeveloped sites that were included in his two deals there.
Marwaha said that land could eventually lead him to his first attempts at ground-up residential development.
“The play is that we own around 9 acres of land that could be converted into multifamily development,” he said.
In the near term, Marwaha plans to upgrade the roof and HVAC system on Marwaha Tower II, which was built in 2001, and follow his usual practice of being aggressive in leasing to new tenants. They would join the building’s existing anchor tenant, local trucking and logistics firm Estes.
Marwaha has enlisted Tucker Dowdy and Eric Hammond from Commonwealth Commercial to handle leasing. They’re marketing the vacant space with a $23 per square foot asking price for a full-ser-vice lease.
The seller in the off-market Gateway Centre II deal was a debt fund out of Delaware.
“He just called me and we made a deal,” Marwaha said of how the sale came to be.
Marwaha’s willingness to buy further into the Gateway park comes in part due to his success thus far in landing a large new tenant at Marwaha Tower I.
Bryant & Stratton College earlier this year signed a lease to relocate its local campus into 57,000 square feet across three floors of the 127,000-square-foot building.
Marwaha Tower I , the other building Marwaha owns in the Gateway Centre office park.
He’s had similar success with the other empty offices buildings he’s purchased locally over the last two years.
In 2023 he paid $5.35 million for the Parham Place business park in central Henrico.
At the time, all three of the park’s buildings were empty.
They’re now more than 75 percent occupied with tenants such as the Henrico School Board and contractor Colonial Webb.
Earlier this year he won a foreclosure auction to purchase the Capital City Physicians Building at 8002 Discovery Drive in Henrico for $4.05 million.
The four-story,55,000-square-foot West End building was 75% vacant at the time of the auction.
To date, Marwaha has spent around $22 million on mostly troubled office buildings at a time when the market for office space overall has been shaky due to companies being slow to bring workers back to the office full time in the post-COVID world.
But Marwaha continues to see that dynamic as an opportunity and said he’s not done yet.
We remain bullish on office. We have some really large deals in the pipeline that are about to close in the next 30 days,” he said, while declining to share additional details on those other pending deals.
