Posts by Engineering

Unused Land Parcels – Sell, Hold, or Develop?

on Jul 30, 2012 in Finances: Cost & Revenue | 2 comments

The U.S. Postal Service is one of the largest real estate owners in the United States with more than 8,600 facilities and 950 million square feet of land. (The Postal Service leases another 24,600 facilities.) It also has about 357 unused land parcels with no structures on them, which have a book value of $128 million. The lands’ assessed values are likely to be significantly higher.

The Postal Service has contracted with real estate company C.B. Richard Ellis to sell its surplus real estate, which includes both buildings and land. You can find the properties on the following website, http://www.uspspropertiesforsale.com/. The sale of properties would generate cash flow for the financially strapped organization. It would also contribute to streamlining its physical footprint as the Postal Service aligns itself to be a leaner, faster, and more market-responsive organization. However, the sale of real estate assets would not produce recurring revenues.

21st Century Post Office: Opportunities to Share Excess Resources

on Dec 5, 2011 in Ideas Worth Exploring | 3 comments

The U.S. Postal Service owns or leases more than 33,000 facilities with approximately 284 million interior square feet (SF). These facilities are in virtually every community throughout the country and range in size from 55 SF to 32 acres under one roof. We visited 717 of these facilities as part of 10 facility optimization audits and identified over 21 million excess SF of space. During our subsequent national facility optimization audit, we statistically projected that the Postal Service has about 67 million SF of excess space nationwide.

In addition to an abundance of space, recent audits have disclosed that there are unmanned or underused windows in post offices around the nation, as well as more workhours at retail facilities than needed based on fiscal year 2011 workloads.

The solution most often suggested for dealing with these excess resources is to consolidate and close facilities. In fact, the Postal Service is in the process of identifying both retail and mail processing facilities for closure or consolidation.