Nearly two years after hiring a firm to explore a sale of the MLB’s Washington Nationals, Mark Lerner told The Washington Post Monday his family has decided not to sell the team.
Over that span, two other professional sports franchises in the DMV have sold, the NFL’s Washington Commanders and the Baltimore Orioles, while the owner of the region’s pro basketball and hockey teams launched plans to move from D.C. to Virginia.
Those two years have also seen a dramatic disruption to commercial real estate, the industry in which the Lerners made their billions. But while the family broke its silence on the Nationals, the status of its massive portfolio of D.C.-area real estate remains opaque.
The Lerner family owns millions of square feet of older office buildings, which have come under intense pressure since the onset of the pandemic, requiring big investments to stay competitive.
