Laws

Changes in the House Republican leadership overseeing GSA continue. Incoming House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman William “Bill” Shuster (R-Pa.) announced yesterday (January 16) that he is appointing fellow Pennsylvania Republican Lou Barletta to head the Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management Subcommittee. That subcommittee oversees federal real estate programs, including GSA’s Public Buildings […]

One of GSA’s unique challenges is that it must adapt its leases to accommodate a vast array of laws, executive orders, federal regulations and other agencies’ policies.  That’s a hard thing to do and it’s made more difficult by the fact that GSA isn’t always an active participant in the creation of these laws and […]

Attached is our review of last year’s federally leased property sales activity. Highlights from this report include: • Consolidation of leases, multi-agency occupancy, and relocation of leases to GSA-owned buildings continues to take place; • From YE 2012 to YE 2015, GSA has trimmed its lease inventory by 6%, but total square footage is only […]

Experienced GSA-leased property investors are quite familiar with the advantages and challenges associated with ownership of property leased to the GSA.  However, new entrants to the investment sales market for single-tenant GSA-leased property often ask why investors seek to acquire these assets. We typically answer this question by highlighting the advantages and challenges associated with […]

While the federal government owns thousands of historic structures, maintaining those properties in a time of increasingly constrained budgets poses considerable challenges. One of those challenges involves the need for accurate information about such properties. Where are they, in what condition are they; are they occupied or vacant, being used by the government or leased […]

Despite widespread cutbacks throughout the federal government, one area has been growing across multiple agencies: cybersecurity. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, has increased its cybersecurity workforce by more than 600 percent over the past few years, and expects to hire at least another 600 cyber professionals—and possibly many more. DHS’s FY2013 budget […]

The President’s 218-page FY 2015 federal budget request was released a week ago and it underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity. The word “cyber”, for example, appears 40 times in the budget. Collaboration is another major theme and Obama’s proposed request “identifies and promotes cross-agency cybersecurity indicatives and priorities, including improving cybersecurity information sharing while […]

As procrastinating Americans prepare to file their 2012 federal tax returns by midnight tonight (April 15), we thought this would be a good time to take a look at the agency to which they’ll be sent: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS’s mission is to “provide America’s taxpayers top quality service by helping them […]

This morning, Bisnow, hosted its 2013 Federal Property Summit featuring a great cast of speakers including: Dan Tangherlini, the acting (and soon to be permanent) head of the GSA; Dorothy Robyn, GSA’s Public Buildings Service Commissioner; Norman Dong Deputy Controller at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); and a host of private-sector professionals who specialize in […]

The Colliers Government Solutions team represents owners of government-leased properties nationally. So, we travel a lot. This slideshow profiles my recent trip to Los Angeles, California. (Use arrow buttons to advance slides) https://www.capitolmarkets.com/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/Approach to LAX.JPG My colleague, Jarrett Morrell, took this photo of downtown L.A. (the cluster of high-rise towers in the distance) from the window of […]

The following is an excerpt from a presentation I gave at the National Federal Development Association conference last month in Washington, D.C. The presentation covered three themes: 1) The size of the federally leased property market is small; 2) It is getting smaller, and; 3) There are five factors that could return the market to future growth. This article profiles the […]

In a recent Washington Business Journal article entitled “Time is running out for the feds to take advantage of Washington’s tenant market” (*paywall*), the reporter noted that GSA will struggle to take full advantage of the current tenant’s market before the pendulum swings back to the landlord’s favor. This, despite the fact that GSA has many leases expiring in the […]

As we reported yesterday, the federal government—the biggest property owner in the United States—is now in the process of disposing of billions of dollars worth of properties that it no longer needs. While the disposal process is well underway—GSA disposed of 88 vacant or underused properties in FY2010 and 2011—some 12,000 domestic federal properties remain on […]

U.S. Dept of Interior Headquarters (photo: GSA) 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 in a large federal building. Construction of the 1,300,000 SF structure in […]