The sprawling Food and Drug Administration (FDA) campus in Silver Spring, Maryland, will soon be welcoming another major regulatory component of the agency: the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Beginning about May 1, moving vans will collect CBER employees from various leased suburban Maryland locations and deliver them to the federally owned 130-acre Federal […]
This past week, Colliers published its “Top Office Metros Snapshot” focused on ten of the nation’s most notable office markets. All of these are among the top 20 metros occupied by GSA so we take an interest in this report. The results indicate improvement (from the investor’s viewpoint) in most markets, but there are laggards, […]
“CEA” is the abbreviation for “Central Employment Area”. The term has significance in federal leasing dating back to August 16, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12072. The Executive Order included a key provision that has greatly impacted the location of federal offices ever since: Except where such selection is otherwise prohibited, the […]
Recently completed Bakersfield Federal Courthouse (Photo: KBAK/KBFX) The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) signed by President Obama in 2009 called for major new construction and the energy-efficient modernization of federal office buildings, courthouses and land ports across the country. This is the fourth piece in a series in which we examine some of the […]
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. […]
