Competitors vie for neither lucrative NBA contracts nor sizable office bracket pools in GSA’s March Madness-style Federal Building Challenge. An annual competition between sustainable buildings around the country, the contest awards the winner only bragging rights…
Tag: government lease
Spotlight: OSHA
Workplace injuries resulted in 4,383 worker deaths in 2012, the second lowest total since the census began in 1992. The leading causes, known as the “fatal four,” were falling, being struck by an object, electrocution, and…
District of Columbia Expands Benchmarking
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, commercial buildings account for nearly 50% of all building energy use and about 20% of total energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions nationwide. New York, Seattle, Boston, and a…
Trouble Ahead With DC Real Estate Taxes
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…
Spotlight: CBER
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…
Polar Vortex Not Chilling WDC Core Office Sales
Our investment sales team was especially prolific last week, issuing two new reports on the Washington, DC area property market. The 2013 Year End Washington, DC Capital Markets Report noted that many primary and secondary markets around the…
Alternative Approaches to Funding for Federal Real Property
A recent bounce in GSA’s funds from Congress has modestly improved the agency’s ability to reduce the federal footprint and shift more toward owned space, as we discussed earlier this month. But the slight budget relief…
Better Buildings Bill Update
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…
The Bounceback: GSA’s Budget Returns to “Normal” (and what that means for lessors)
We’ve often said on this blog that you need only look at GSA’s budget as the bellwether for leasing demand. In recent years we’ve noted that budget reductions imposed by Congress have put GSA in a…
New Cybersecurity Center Planned
The President’s 218-page FY 2015 federal budget request was released a week ago and it underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity. The word “cyber”, for example, appears 40 times in the budget. Collaboration is another major…