St Elizabeths East – Current Condition (Photo: Crystal Bae, www.crystalbae.com) While GSA and DHS have been working on the much-delayed DHS Headquarters Campus on (primarily) the west side of the former St Elizabeths Hospital site, the District of Columbia has been planning its own redevelopment project on the east side of Martin Luther King Blvd. […]
Immediately following Donald Trump’s oath of office, his campaign proposal Contract with the American Voter became an action plan. The second item listed is the President’s declaration that he would pursue “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).” The hiring freeze […]
Foreign-owned buildings containing high security space leased by GSA (Source: GAO | GAO-17-195) Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) publicly released its report titled GSA Should Inform Tenant Agencies When Leasing High-Security Space From Foreign Owners. The title pretty well summarizes the report’s conclusion – that GSA should determine if its high-security leased buildings are owned by […]
With Veterans Day approaching, we turn our spotlight on the federal government’s second-largest department. With more than 10,000 employees and more than 150 hospitals, 300 vet centers and 800 community-based outpatient clinics—as well as hundreds of other facilities nationwide—the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is second in size only to the Department of Defense. […]
Which “agency” forms one of the federal government’s three separate and distinct branches? The U.S. Courts—also known as the judicial branch, the federal judiciary and the federal courts—were created under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, and include the Supreme Court of the United States, district courts, appellate courts, bankruptcy courts and courts of special […]
Watching the National Science Foundation shuffle in the starting blocks, most of the Northern Virginia real estate community has expressed certainty that, especially in this budget environment, NSF is unlikely to be moving from its present…
Hipolito F. Garcia Building during renovation (Photo: Waymarking.com) A green roof is the centerpiece of the renovated 75-year-old Hipolito F. Garcia Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in San Antonio, part of what makes it the “greenest” building owned by GSA. It is the first GSA-owned building to earn LEED-Platinum certification, thanks to a $56.6 million […]
Government real estate at the federal, state and local level is roughly estimated to comprise 6 billion square feet in the United States and its territories. Colliers International Government Solutions operates in this space daily, advising both private landlords and public agencies on issues related to the real estate leasing, sales and policy matters unique to […]
A unique feature of GSA leases is that when lessors reduce their operating costs, GSA does not receive the benefit, because the government pays for operating cost adjustments based upon the change in CPI–not actual cost changes. Yet, GSA does reimburse lessors for actual increases in Real Estate Taxes. In the event that taxes decrease, GSA receives […]
The government right now is, well, it’s in turmoil. That’s voiced as an opinion but it feels like actual, quantifiable fact. The United States is still fighting its way out of a deep and prolonged recession,…
The federal property sector remains a small niche in the overall investment market, but it is also dynamic. Despite the fact that the overall federal real property inventory is shrinking, sales over the past 12 months have remained active. Remarkably, slightly more than half of all federally leased properties purchased in the past year were acquired by […]
The investment market for GSA-leased properties has become progressively robust as investors seek to place capital in long-term leased, stable assets. To the degree that these can be bought with 10+ years remaining (and a properly structured lease) many investors feel like they are buying a bond, except with improved returns. Unfortunately, however, there are […]
The House of Representatives, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, convened this morning in a mark-up hearing to finally approve 11 prospectuses, nearly all of which have been languishing on the Hill for more than a year. In fact, our quick review of the last 78 lease prospectuses approved by this committee confirms that process is rarely […]
Colliers today released its mid-year report profiling activity in North American office markets. The results are mostly bullish: Following the negative weather impact on most economic metrics earlier in the year, the U.S. economy rebounded well in subsequent months, adding more than 200,000 jobs per month between February and July and registering real GDP growth […]
