Howard T. Markey Federal Courthouse, home to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (photo: waymarking.com) Looming large in the federal lease portfolio and in the minds of federal property investors is the “prospectus lease.” Numbering just over 200 nationwide, these are the GSA leases that exceed $3.095 million in annual levelized rent (net of most […]
On the second day of congressional hearings on the GSA Las Vegas Conference scandal, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management, led by Committee Chairman John Mica…
Sequestration—originally a legal term referring to an agent of the court taking valuable property into custody to prevent it from being disposed of or abused before a dispute over its ownership can be resolved—has been adapted by Congress in more recent years to describe a new fiscal policy procedure first provided for by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings […]
Photo: White House President Obama last week announced that he is asking Congress for the authority to merge six trade and commerce entities into a single department tasked with boosting American business and promoting competitiveness. Specifically, his plan would merge the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the […]
With over 1,000 leased facilities, often in single-tenant buildings, the Social Security Administration (SSA) is a staple of many federal investor portfolios. Like other federal agencies, however, SSA has been dutifully implementing the “Reduce the Footprint”…
St. Elizabeths Campus Rendering (courtesy of GSA) The original $3.45 billion plan to consolidate the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) headquarters at a 4.5 million-square-foot campus on the site of the former St. Elizabeths Hospital—moving more than 14,000 workers from more than 180 separate offices and reducing the department’s leased spaces in the Washington […]
In written testimony on March 7th before the House, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Installations and Environment, confirmed that DoD has embarked upon a formal initiative to review the Department’s anti-terrorism/force protection (ATFP)…
The government right now is, well, it’s in turmoil. That’s voiced as an opinion but it feels like actual, quantifiable fact. The United States is still fighting its way out of a deep and prolonged recession,…
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…
Near the end of his Administration, on December 16, 2016, President Barack Obama made a Republican politician very happy. Jeff Denham, first elected to Congress from California’s 19th District and reelected three times from the redrawn…
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,…
Where would you go to see The Spirit of St. Louis, the monoplane that, in 1927, bore Charles Lindbergh on the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris? How about Tony Hawk’s skateboard, which carried…
There are few investors of GSA-leased properties who have not engaged in hand-wringing over renewal rents, even when buying properties years in advance of the lease expiration date. Normally when presented with the question of whether the…
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…
