Senior realty officers from GSA and six federal agencies face congressional members to address leasing challenges. On July 30th the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hosted a subcommittee hearing entitled: “GSA Tenant Agencies: Challenges and Opportunities in Reducing Costs of Leased Space”. The assembled witnesses included Norman Dong, the Commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, […]
Which federal agency is both a military force and a law enforcement agency? The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), one of the nation’s five armed forces and the only military organization within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “is simultaneously and at all times a military force and federal law enforcement agency dedicated to safety, security, […]
This is a reprint of an article written for Northern Virginia NAIOP in April. To view it as it appeared in print, click here. Northern Virginia houses to the second greatest concentration of federal government agencies in the United States. That is in large part due to its location directly across the Potomac River from […]
GSAXCHANGE, the investment sales arm of Colliers Government Solutions, has published its Mid-Year 2015 “Government-Leased Assets” report, which includes an overview of sales activity and trends in the federal sector. Some insights from this report: Cap rates on longer-lease term assets continue to trend slightly downward, and cap rates on medium- and shorter-lease term assets drop as investors […]
Chained CPI is one element of the budget blueprint President Obama released last Wednesday (April 10) that is getting a lot of attention. So what, exactly, is chained CPI? It’s short for “Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers,” also referred to as C-CPI-U, and is, essentially, another way to index federal spending—including Social […]
As illustrated in the graph above, the average age of buildings leased by GSA has hovered at or around 15 years through the 2000s. Yet, recently that figure has been trending older. The GSA leased inventory is aging. But why? There are probably two primary drivers propelling this trend. The first is that GSA’s leasing corps has been leaning […]
In the 2015 tax year the District of Columbia will implement a new assessment method that will substantially increase real estate taxes for most office properties. This method relies on comparable sales instead of evaluating net cash flow. The result is that assessments are expected to rise such that $10.1 billion will be added to the […]
From the 7,000-acre Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Services Center in Beltsville, Md.; more than 200 of its more than 500 structures are currently vacant or underutilized. (Source: Oversight and Government Reform Committee Flickr site) As we reported last month, although Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) had to resign as chairman of the House Transportation and […]
A highly-efficient HVAC system, locally sourced stone and recycled construction waste are just a few of the sustainable features at a new federal building complex in Hazelton, West Virginia. An innovative laundry water recycling system is also expected to save over 2 million gallons of water per year. But design elements that bring daylight into […]
If you are the owner of a GSA-leased property, you’ve probably recognized by now that there is no holdover clause in your lease. This doesn’t mean the government cannot hold over; it only means that it will pay no penalty for doing so. So it’s no surprise that GSA leases routinely lapse into holdover status. […]
This week the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1734, known as the Civilian Property Realignment Act (CPRA), with voting carried by the Republican-led House, largely along party lines. The legislation describes its purpose as “To decrease the deficit by realigning, consolidating, selling, disposing, and improving the efficiency of Federal buildings and other civilian real property, and […]
GSAXCHANGE, the investment sales arm of Colliers Government Solutions, has published its Spring 2014 “Government-Leased Assets” report, which includes an overview of sales activity and trends in the federal sector. Driven by the lack of product…
If government agencies could make New Year’s resolutions, improving energy and water efficiency and saving taxpayer dollars would be good ones. And some of the support needed to keep up their resolve would come from a GSA program, Green Proving Ground (GPG). Through GPG, new and underutilized technologies are tested in federal facilities to analyze which […]
UPDATE: We updated this article the day after first publishing it in order to tune up our stats. The new graph (above) tracks the percentage of leases that have less than 3 years of remaining lease term as opposed to the number of leases that were executed for total terms of less than 3 years. We found that the latter […]
