One well-known quirk of GSA leases is that operating cost reimbursements are not based on increases in actual costs. Rather, they are calculated on the increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), one of two primary CPI indexes published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For each […]
Most investors would probably agree that cap rates for government-leased properties are trending downward. We took a quick look at sales of government-leased properties (90+% leased by the federal government) over the past decade. The trend was about as anticipated with cap rates moving steeply lower and sales volume increasing into 2007. Then a variety […]
In January 2018, then–Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced a sweeping program to reorganize the department, the largest such reorganization since its founding in 1849. Zinke’s plan involved dividing the United States into thirteen regions,…
“BRAC” is the abbreviation for Base Realignment and Closure. Though, to be technically correct, it is formally used by DoD as the acronym for Base Closure and Realignment. Either way, BRAC is the process by which…
The late-19th century German economist, Adolph Wagner, observed that as progressive industrialized economies grow the public sector expands as a percentage of the overall economy. Wagner’s observation, which later became known as Wagner’s Law, or “The Law of Increasing State Activity,” has persisted through the ensuing century to the present. Why does government spending increase? Wagner’s […]
According to our research, the answer is very rarely. As of the December 2011 GSA lease inventory, there are a total of 339 GSA leases within the District of Columbia, totaling approximately 25.5 MSF. Of those, roughly 315 leases totaling 24.4 MSF (96%) are located in the CEA (Central Employment Area) shaded in purple above. […]
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) leases private property at a cost of billions of dollars—$5.7 billion annually, to be precise, spread out over more than 8,000 leases. Every year, the agency claims, it saves taxpayers significant amounts of money—about $225 million a year over the last three years—by working through private real estate brokers […]
When the new Department of the Interior (DOI) headquarters opened in 1936, employees enjoyed the latest in building amenities and technologies: a gymnasium, movable steel office partitions, a soda fountain, and the first air conditioning system…
2000 North Roosevelt Blvd, Key West, Florida When we searched for the GSA’s most expensive office lease (measured in rent per square foot) we expected to find it in New York, or Boston, or maybe San Francisco or L.A., but we never expected to find it in laid-back Magaritaville (Key West, Florida for the non-Parrotheads). […]
As reported yesterday (Tuesday, February 19) by Dan Sernovitz in the Washington Business Journal, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) is “weighing a significant expansion of its office space in D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, where it…
It is a well-accepted fact that the federal leased space market is shrinking. This is troublesome, yet for investors the real question has been whether the shrinking inventory has also made investment opportunities more scarce. The answer, unfortunately,…
In written testimony on March 7th before the House, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Installations and Environment, confirmed that DoD has embarked upon a formal initiative to review the Department’s anti-terrorism/force protection (ATFP)…
Photo: GSA Blogs During the week of March 5–9, more than 6,400 GSA staffers—about half of the agency’s workforce—didn’t show up at their office. But those workers weren’t sick or slacking off—they were participating in National Telework Week by working from home, a shared workplace, or an office other than their own. Participation more than […]
GSA’s aging inventory is not a new topic on this blog; a 2017 analysis revealed frequent lease extensions and a persistent decline in new construction as primary drivers. As the pandemic persists, with associated economic jitters and weak office space demand, it’s worth revisiting the trajectory of senescence in federal real property. The graphs above […]
