The decision to start writing a blog is a bit like dipping your toe in the water, knowing it’s cold yet forcing yourself to jump in anyway. As it turns out, it’s not so bad once you get used to it. In fact, once you warm up to blogging it can be pretty enjoyable.
When we started this blog at the beginning of the year, we were privately concerned that we wouldn’t be able to sustain it. The problem wasn’t a lack of ideas (we have a running list of about 160 article ideas currently) but instead it was our concern that we just wouldn’t be able to devote the effort. Our team is engaged in dozens of government lease and sale transactions all across the U.S. Where would we find the time?
Well we found the time and we think it has been well spent. To quote the iconic self-help guru Ben Sweetland: “We cannot hold a torch to lighten another’s path without brightening our own.” Writing for Capitol Markets was conceived as an effort to share our experience with the rest of the industry but, unexpectedly, it has improved our own knowledge of the government sector too.
Mostly, we’ve appreciated the kind feedback we’ve received from many of you. It has encouraged us to now write almost every day. We’ve covered a broad range of topics this year and here are a few of them we thought we’d share again:
- Our very first article profiled the State Department’s 457,000 RSF consolidation lease at 600 19th Street, NW in Washington, DC. We expected to write about many more transactions but, frankly, it’s been a slow year for big, notable deals. We do plan to gear our focus more towards transactions-related news in the future because we are all deal-junkies at our core.
- Reading budgets and legislation can be brutally tedious but it yields good info. This year we dived into the President’s FY’13 budget, GSA’s FY’13 budget proposal and the National Defense Authorization Act. We also explored the budget process and took a deeper look at some pretty pedantic stuff like continuing resolutions and sequestration.
- The GSA Las Vegas Scandal led to the firing and resignation of GSA’s senior leadership and provided lots of fodder for our blog. We tried to avoid getting caught up in the hype but we did devote several articles covering hearings hosted by the House and Senate.
- Last but not least, we have indulged our interest in market data and analysis to study GSA’s lease expirations trend, the size distribution of its leases, historical cap rates, dwindling lease terms and a multitude of other topics.
Capitol Markets is a key part of our team’s effort to engage with you. We invite your comments, emails and phone calls, and we look forwarded to announcing our 200th blog post someday soon!