Colliers recently issued a profile of the Top 25 U.S. office markets, which observed that net absorption fell into negative territory for the first time in a decade and vacancy rates posted their sharpest increase over…
Tag: GSA leases
GSA’s Progress Toward Long-Term Leasing
GSA’s effort toward execution of long-term leases has been a popular topic among investors. Going back to the earliest days of this blog, we observed that the remaining term of GSA leases was dwindling. When GSA…
U.S. Office Absorption Turns Negative for the First Time in 10 Years
In the category of not-unexpected-but-still-bad-news, Colliers issued its Q2 2020 Office Market Outlook last week reporting that U.S. office absorption turned negative for the first time in a decade. National office demand was negative 13.6 million…
The Specter of Deflation and What it Means for GSA Lessors
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…
Can We Expect the Government Sector to Outperform? Lessons from the Last Fiscal Crisis
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…
A New GAO Report Questions GSA Savings Claims
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…
BLM’s Proposed Reorganization Stirs Controversy
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,…
SIOR Conference Presentation
Last week the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR) held its Spring World Conference in Washington, DC. I was fortunate to be asked to participate in a panel discussion entitled “Federal Real Estate Opportunities” alongside,…
Prospectus Authorization: What Does It Really Mean?
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…
GSA Leases Appear to be Growing Longer
The GSA property market has been characterized by a relative scarcity of long-term leases. This unwillingness of federal agencies to commit to long-term contracts is due to budget distress, mission uncertainty and challenges complying with OMB mandates to reconfigure…