You’ve inspected the building and it appears sound. You’ve interviewed the tenants and they seem happy. You’ve toured the market and it triggers no alarms. You’ve done all of your normal due diligence, so you buy. Then, later, when…
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Colliers Releases 2Q’14 North American Office Report
Colliers today released its mid-year report profiling activity in North American office markets. The results are mostly bullish: Following the negative weather impact on most economic metrics earlier in the year, the U.S. economy rebounded well…
Spotlight: Smithsonian Institution
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…
Lease Patterns, and What They Tell Us
Looking at remaining term of federal leases relative to building age, an interesting pattern emerges: the leases appear in “waves”. The scattergraph above shows office buildings that are at least 85% leased by federal tenants. We’ve plotted every building…
GSA Swap-Construct Exchanges
It’s a simple proposition: Build us a new building, even something as simple as a parking garage, and you can have the old one. That old building might be an office tower, a courthouse, or some…
Top GSA Property Owners (2014 Edition)
Last year we published our inaugural list of the ten largest owners of GSA-leased properties. In this article we chronicle the top 10 list again, along with a few new honorable mentions. The ranking looks a lot like last…
The Long-Term Trend of Short-Term Leased Space
UPDATE: We updated this article the day after first publishing it in order to tune up our stats. The new graph (above) tracks the percentage of leases that have less than 3 years of remaining lease term…
The Persistent Problem with Termination Rights
It is possible that no tenant in the United States has greater fondness for termination rights than the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). As I pointed out in a blog article more than two years ago,…
Agencies Pay Lip Service to the Virtues of Long-Term Leases
On July 30th the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hosted a subcommittee hearing entitled: “GSA Tenant Agencies: Challenges and Opportunities in Reducing Costs of Leased Space”. The assembled witnesses included Norman Dong, the Commissioner of GSA’s…
Greetings From Kansas City
The Colliers Government Solutions team represents owners of government-leased properties nationally. So, we travel a lot. This slideshow profiles my trip earlier this year to Kansas City–both Missouri and Kansas. Yes, there is snow on the…