Posts Tagged ‘defense real estate’

Lend Lease Corp. closed on the third phase of the Army’s Privatization of Army Lodging program, securing $465 million in project debt to expand the initiative to 18 new posts, the international property and infrastructure group said Wednesday. Over the next eight years, Lend Lease will deliver 1,018 new Candlewood Suites brand hotel rooms and renovate 2,745 hotel rooms to Holiday Inn Express brand standards. The 18 installations under phase three cover about 3,800 hotel rooms throughout the United States …

A local developer plans to lease the hotel and bachelor housing at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station, Maine, to the Navy to house sailors assigned to nearby Bath Iron Works. George Schott has agreed to purchase the 248-room hotel and 190 bachelor apartments for $6 million, Steve Levesque, executive director of the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, told the Bangor Daily News. Scott previously purchased about 700 units of former housing at the air station, now renamed Brunswick Landing. The LRA initially hoped the former Navy hotel could continue to be operated as a hotel, but a feasibility study concluded the community could not support it. “The fact that [Schott] is going to use [the housing] for what it was initially designed for — to support sailors — is fine with us,” Levesque said.

A House Oversight subcommittee used the setting of a vacant warehouse in Southeast Washington less than a mile away from Capitol Hill on Thursday to hold the latest in a series of hearings highlighting the federal government’s slow pace in disposing of unneeded properties. The General Services Administration-owned warehouse has been empty since September 2009 and costs the government $70,000 a year to maintain. “It’s just a pattern of not being able to make decisions, and it’s remarkable given that we’re in the nation’s capital …

Picerne Military Housing, the East Greenwich, R.I.-based firm founded in 1998 to partner with DOD to run military housing, is now Corvias Military Living. The name change announced earlier this month reinforces the corporate re-branding that began last July when the firm launched a student housing division, Corvias Campus Living. Since its founding, the company has partnered with the Army at seven posts to build, renovate and manage more than 21,000 homes. Corvias, which manages 6,500 homes at Fort Bragg, N.C., recently announced plans to expand the pilot program of apartments it built there in 2009 for single enlisted soldiers E6 and above. The company will add 120 units to the existing 312-unit Randolph Pointe complex, reported the Fayetteville Observer.

DOD expects to incur more than $24 million in costs at two installations shuttered during the 2005 round of base closures to unwind renewable energy and privatized utility projects affected by the closures, according to a new Government Accountability Office study. At Fort Monmouth, N.J., the Army paid about $24.3 million to terminate a renewable energy contract involving ground source heat pumps and to install several boilers to replace the heat pumps. The Army also terminated a privatized electrical utility contract at Fort Monroe, Va., but has not yet reached a settlement with the utility over the termination …

In a review of the impact of the growing number of privatization projects on military installations, the Government Accountability Office concluded that future base closure rounds would benefit from the Defense Department providing more comprehensive information about the potential costs created when DOD terminates project agreements with the private sector. The congressional watchdog agency found that the department likely would incur liabilities following a BRAC round for renewable energy and privatized utility projects on affected installations …

Pentagon spending to support a permanent military presence in Germany, South Korea and Japan is subject to little oversight and rising faster than anticipated, according to a report released Wednesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nearly 70 percent of the $10 billion DOD spends on overseas installations goes to facilities in those three countries. The committee’s review looked at how the burden of costs is shared between the United States and its allies, the impact of planned posture changes on those costs, and the spending and oversight of foreign governments’ in-kind payments used for military construction projects …

Despite recently auctioning off a high-profile property in Northwest Washington, D.C., the federal government still has a way to go in its effort to streamline the process for agencies to dispose of excess properties. Last month a development team submitted the winning bid of $19.5 million to purchase the Georgetown West Heating Plant, a vacant property over the past decade that has cost $3.5 million in annual upkeep. Still, only a minority of the savings made in response to President Obama’s initiative to cut real estate spending has come from getting rid of some of the federal government’s 14,000 excess properties …

Lend Lease is set to start construction of new homes and other facilities after closing Monday on $78.9 million in government funding for phase four of its housing privatization project covering Marine Corps installations in four states. Much of the new construction under phase four for Atlantic Marine Corps Communities LLC — the 50-year partnership between Lend Lease and the Navy — will take place at Marine Corp Base Camp Lejeune, N.C. …

A measure to exempt military housing owned by the private sector from local property taxes has been steadily moving through both chambers of the Florida Legislature. On Thursday the legislation cleared the last of several House committees and now will go to that chamber’s floor. A version of the bill also has moved through multiple Senate panels, and is expected to be debated in that chamber this week …