Entrance to the Lenexa subsurface records facility owned by Meritex, Inc. How and where do federal agencies keep their vast amounts of records? The Code of Federal Regulations authorizes the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish, maintain and operate records centers for federal agencies; it also empowers it to approve records centers that […]
We have written a lot on this blog about how the GSA-leased property market is getting smaller, a trend we expect to continue easily for the next few years. Yes, one day this trend may reverse itself but there are really only a few ways that might happen, and none of them seem likely right now (and some we […]
Breakthrough House, a center established to support the recovery of individuals with mental illness, occupies a facility in Topeka, Kansas, that was formerly occupied by the Social Security Administration (Photo: Google Maps). A recent (March 21) decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in a 25-year-old lawsuit against the government found […]
Last week, the Lipsey Company announced the results of its annual global survey, again ranking Colliers International the second-most recognized commercial real estate brand in the world. Now in its twelfth year, the Lipsey survey combines voting and…
Thirty-two U.S. Senators stayed up all night on March 10, speaking non-stop to stir Congressional colleagues into action on climate change. Overnight talking points emphasized state-by-state economic damage such as crop losses from California droughts, coastal destruction from extreme storm surges in New Jersey, and shrinking lobster harvests in Connecticut’s warming Long Island Sound. Senator […]
Inside one of the current National Targeting Centers (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP File Photo) Two days after planting a car bomb in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad boarded a plane for Dubai at JFK International Airport. But a routine post-boarding check discovered Shahzad on the no-fly list, and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents […]
In 2012, the Obama administration’s Freeze the Footprint policy order mandated that the federal government reduce its real estate footprint and curb its accumulation of unused or underused properties. The following year, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance on how these reductions should be planned. Since then, the federal government reduced its real-estate […]
Moody’s website reports U.S. debt rating remains Aaa…for now It was widely reported yesterday (Tuesday, September 11) that the United States is in danger of another credit downgrade, this time by Moodys. In its press release the credit rating agency said that it would likely downgrade the U.S. government’s debt rating from Aaa to Aa1 […]
It’s clear that cap rates for long-term, GSA-leased properties have fallen steadily since the end of the 2008 recession. Yet, we’ve been challenged to demonstrate that in a meaningful way. The problem is that merely reporting government-leased property sales doesn’t show much correlation between cap rates and the march of time. This is largely because […]
GSA’s lease selection process has made it a perpetual pioneer – pushing it to the fringe submarkets where office space is more generally available in abundant cheap supply. In the early 1990s the “fringe” was the East End, an area that thrives today but was once home to the city’s “red light” district. In the 2000s […]
The federal leased property inventory has been getting smaller since the end of 2012 and indications are that the trend will continue. One need only look at prospectus approvals to be certain of this because, while there are slightly more than 200 leases with annual rent large enough to exceed the prospectus threshold, those leases comprise about […]
Even as construction began on a long-awaited, 600,000 SF courthouse in Los Angeles this fall, efforts to downsize or close federal court facilities picked up in pace. Last week, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts…
The massive Building 10 sits in the center of NIH’s Bethesda campus. Which federal agency began in 1887 as the one-room “Laboratory of Hygiene” and has since grown to encompass 27 separate institutes and centers that occupy almost 16 million gross square feet of government-owned space and nearly 4 million rentable square feet of leased […]
Welcome to our third year tracking the largest property investors in the federal space. For those of you who have reviewed the 2013 and 2014 editions of our “top 10” list, you know that we limited those lists to owners of GSA-leased properties. While GSA is the primary lessee of space on behalf of federal […]
