Real Estate Brings New Challenges - An Interview With Mr. Scott Whiteford, Acting Director of Real Estate, by Charles Dervarics Reprinted from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 2008 yearbook, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces.
With a late 2008 deadline for the United States to establish a fence along the border with Mexico, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Real Estate Office, on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, is hard at work negotiating rights of way with all types of property owners – from ranchers to golf course owners.
“It’s a challenge,” acknowledged Scott Whiteford, acting director of USACE Real Estate. With 450 parcels needed for the project, it’s become a priority for Corps of Engineers Real Estate this year, with 75 specialists deployed to the field. “Each property owner’s circumstance is unique,” he said.
But such an assignment is all part of a day’s work at the Corps’ Real Estate Office, which deals with thousands of real estate actions per year. Most people can identify with this by remembering the details of their own real estate purchase or lease transactions; however, the Corps is likely to repeat those steps for more than 30,000 actions annually.
The Corps’ Real Estate Office is busier than ever for a number of reasons. Aside from the border fence, it has chief responsibility to acquire or sell real estate for two of the military’s most high-profile issues: BRAC, which will bring realignment to 53 bases and close 13 others, and military transformation, which will bring some troops home from overseas and create more U.S.-based brigade combat teams as part of growing the modular force initiative.
Other real estate specialists are deployed to Southwest Asia to support the efforts in the Global War on Terror by procuring real estate for use in military operations and overseeing the transfer of new or restored property from the U.S. military to trained government personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these structures are complex infrastructure facilities – for water and power – in which the Corps helps build capacity within those nations to manage such structures. “It’s a difficult process, but we’re happy that they’re working there,” Whiteford added.
Another little-known task of the Corps’ Real Estate Office is to rent and lease space for Armed Forces recruiting offices. Under BRAC, Whiteford’s office is not only selling property, but purchasing property to relocate 32 Army Reserve centers. For these tasks, the real estate team handles many of the steps common to homebuyers – working with a broker, reviewing multiple listing services, and driving from site to site. In most cases, any potential location must be zoned commercial or industrial. “It’s a challenge,” he said.
Another program in the USACE Real Estate arsenal is the Reserve property exchange. Under this plan, the Corps sells property that houses a Reserve office; in exchange, the purchaser builds or contracts with a developer to build a new Reserve center on an existing Army facility.
Given declining real estate prices in many markets, there is a growing focus on the Department of Defense (DoD) Homeowners Assistance Program, which USACE executes. This program helps civilian and military homeowners who are moving as a result of BRAC and related transformation efforts. Traditionally, DoD has helped homeowners who may lose value on their homes as a result of base closings. But such assistance is on the rise, in part because of the many uneven real estate markets.
“In many cases, DoD becomes the homeowner in a depressed market,” Whiteford said. Alternatively, the Corps may authorize some aid to cover the cost of what a homeowner might have received without BRAC. “This is one part of our business that has grown unexpectedly,” he said.
Whiteford’s office also responds to natural disasters. In addition to the ongoing work with hurricane recovery associated with Hurricane Katrina, it helped find temporary space for displaced residents as well as for federal employees working to address the floods in the Midwest.
Overall, the Corps’ Real Estate Office expects to do $950 million in total transactions in 2009. “We have a diverse staff in so many locations,” Whiteford noted. For military challenges of all sizes, he said, “It all begins and ends with real estate.”