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…
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…
A while back we studied the national lease expirations trend and we were interested to see how the volume of expirations tends to “step” down about every five years. The big step occurs after 10 years of remaining term because leases longer than that are typically reserved for build-to-suits, especially that class of leases with […]
Since the end of 2012, GSA has been actively working to reduce the size of its leased footprint. Progress has been modest but consistent. At its December 2012 zenith, GSA leased 198.6 million square feet of space…
On December 27, 2019, the five-person Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB) presented a report to the Office of Management and Budget that identifies a dozen federal properties that, it urges, should be sold. Guided by the…
Kevin Warsh, a Federal Reserve governor during the Great Recession, noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year, “If you’ve seen one financial crisis, you’ve seen one financial crisis.” That is to say, all…
Recently, Ross Litkenhous of Altus Group invited me to participate as a guest on his CRE Insider podcast series. We covered a variety of subjects including the SWAMP Act, downsizing, GSA lease terminations and more. The conversation…
On July 10th, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee gave unanimous, bi-partisan approval to move the Public Buildings Savings and Reform Act of 2013 (PBSRA) on from the committee to the House floor. Writing this legislation must have been cathartic for the long-time Representatives who sponsored it because it appears to catalog every grievance the House has […]
What happens when Congress fails to pass a formal federal appropriations bill, and/or the President fails to sign it into law by October 1st? (We ask “when” rather than “if” because this has happened every year since FY 2000.) In order to avoid a government shutdown, Congress passes a joint resolution—known as a “continuing resolution”—that […]
Following his inauguration ceremony on January 20th, President Biden settled into the Oval Office to execute a stack of executive orders and other actions. The third document he signed serves to return the United States to…
Colliers recently released its U.S. 2021 Investor Sentiment Survey Results, an annual look at the mood of the investor community at the start of the New Year. Not surprisingly, more than half of all investors surveyed…
The Obama administration’s “OMB Report Pursuant to the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012,” released last Friday (September 14, 2012), outlines the “devastating” and “deeply destructive” impacts on virtually all aspects of the federal budget that will take place if Congress does not act to prevent about $109 billion in automatic across-the-board budget cuts from occurring at […]
Following his inauguration ceremony on January 20th, President Biden settled into the Oval Office to execute a stack of executive orders and other actions. The third document he signed serves to return the United States to…
The Sequester has arrived–mostly unexpected, entirely unwelcome and apparently it intends to hang around a while. What does it mean for landlords of federal-leased properties? Fortunately, probably not much. At least not much new. The federal government has been staggering from crisis to crisis for years. A Look at the Cuts The great concern with sequestration is […]
