Agency:
General Services Administration
National Capital Region

Capitol CREAG Services:
Strategic Housing Plans
Space Programming coordination
Market Survey
Market Analysis
Building Assessments
Independent Government
Estimates/Estimated Budgets
Develop Solicitation for Offers
Review and Evaluate Offers
Negotiate Offers
Request and receive Best and Final Offers
Prepare Lease Documents and Obtain Signatures
Post Award Services
Coordinate Design Intent Drawings
Lease File Close Out
Adjustment for Vacant Space
Vacant Space Verification
Real Estate Tax Adjustments
Operating Cost Escalations
Succeeding Leases
Lease Extensions
Renegotiation of Existing Leases
Reconfiguration or Realignment Advisory Services
Lease Alterations
Backfill of Vacant Space

Project Challenge:
The Capitol CREAG Team provided Program and Project Management oversight to the GSA National Capital Region (NCR) Northern Virginia Advanced Acquisition Program (AAP). The Advanced Acquisition Program was a pre-competed fast track Government lease procurement service that was used by the GSA NCR to facilitate lease acquisitions in place of the conventional lease procurement process. (It is important to note that the GSA awarded Capitol CREAG four separate contracts under the GSA AAP.)

By the end of our tenure, the Northern Virginia AAP was the preferred lease procurement process to complete new and expiring government leases in the NCR. During the Capitol CREAG Team tenure, we encouraged the use of the program on prospectus level requirements and complex agency mission critical lease requirements through a collaborated marketing effort with the GSA. By the end of our campaign, the Northern Virginia Office AAP inventory had grown to approximately 40 million rentable square feet (RSF) and 250 buildings and completely re-competed on an annual basis. By creating a new procurement and inventory, holding pre-bid forums, negotiating leases and consistently updating the AAP Solicitation for Offeror, we were able to take a lessons learned approach to each successive inventory.

Though the contract period reflects a three year period, the founding partners of Capital CREAG had provided management oversight of the Northern Virginia program since 1995 as subcontractors under a GSA Prime contractor. The members of the Capitol CREAG Team collectively completed approximately 7 million rentable square feet of transactions or 190 lease transactions.

The conventional government lease procurement added significant time to the procurement process. The process required that the agency identify a space requirement, create a Program of Requirements, forward the requirement to the GSA real estate specialist, advertise for buildings, generate an SFO, evaluate and award a building and then build-out the space. The AAP process removes the pre-solicitation phase of the equation saving a minimum of several months in the space acquisition process.

The AAP program faced several significant issues when Capitol CREAG was initially assigned to the program. The large size and clarity of the solicitation was not well received by the market and the solicitation was underutilized by GSA tenant agencies and the real estate market.

The AAP solicitation without attachments was 70 pages long, non-lender friendly, and many of the provisions did not make sense to potential Offerors. The Capitol CREAG Team met with GSA Contracting Officers and the private sector real estate community to facilitate dialogue to reduce the paperwork and create a more acceptable document. Through many revisions of the SFO, the document was reduced from 70 to 40 pages. We were able to reduce the federal ADA and Unified Federal Accessibility Standards requirements section from 16 pages to one paragraph. We also added lifecycles to recurring costs that Lessors incurred over a lease term. Items such as carpet, repainting of common area and tenant space were assigned five-year lifecycles. The GSA Contracting Officers and regional counsel were willing to discuss default provisions in the General Clauses and Certs and Reps attachments of the SFO to address third party financing concerns. The importance of these forums was to assist the GSA to mitigate its risk and lower the possibility of a protest by creating forums for the private sector to voice concerns about the AAP lease procurement process prior to soliciting an AAP procurement.

Through collective efforts of the GSA Contracting Officers, the Program Manager and Project Managers, the AAP was recognized as the procurement of choice among NCR GSA and its client agencies. The three regional AAP programs were responsible for completing roughly 70% of the GSA National Capital Region lease acquisitions by 2001.