Since 1990, the Government Accountability Office has been reporting on federal government operations that it identifies as “high risk” because of their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste and mismanagement; its biennial reports aim to help the federal government identify problems that keep it from operating economically, efficiently and effectively. “Managing Federal Real Property” was added […]

This chart of the Government Real Estate Index is provided courtesy of its creator, Dr. Dennis Eisen. At last week’s National Federal Development Association conference, Dr. Dennis Eisen presented his new Government Real Estate Index, which he bills as the “Dow Jones Index for Government Real Estate”. Dr. Eisen, one of the true students of […]

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…

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms, Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms! Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat. But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks; Here […]

A century and a half ago, after the Civil War had ended, the federal government began an ambitious program of building national hospitals for wounded veterans—a few at first, and then, as those veterans became elderly,…

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). […]