Our facilities are the primary place of interaction with many of our customers. We’re focused on developing innovative solutions to improve that customer experience and provide world-class service. Our real estate portfolio of approximately 32,000 buildings includes 274 million square feet of interior space. It’s vital that we manage and adapt our building portfolio to align with customer and organizational needs at a sustainable cost. The Facilities team provides appropriate facilities for Postal Service needs to ensure proper stewardship and management of real estate inventory and related resources.
Facilities performs strategic planning through “node studies” analyzing the processing, delivery and retail use of existing facilities, and current and future local service needs. This identifies communities that can benefit from additional or modified capacity and locations where capacity exceeds the needs of the Postal Service, representing potential opportunities for savings and revenue generation. The 61 node studies approved in FY2015 represent $100 million in net present value in potential savings.
We executed over 6,000 leases in FY2015, ensuring USPS operations could continue at these properties. Despite increases in lease rates driven by the recovering economy, the rates for leases over $50,000 were negotiated at 8.4 percent below market value. The sale and outleasing of (rental) excess real property, excluding gains, generated $194 million in gross receipts. This trend is slowing as economic conditions shift and opportunities decrease.
In FY2015, the Facilities team implemented portfolio modification projects ranging from emergency replacements to planned infrastructure changes supporting organizational and network initiatives. Facilities completed 22 new construction projects and 255 projects to consolidate or repurpose space within existing buildings. These projects enable the Postal Service to provide enhanced services, maintain or restore operations after catastrophic events, and combine multiple facilities into fewer or smaller locations when appropriate. USPS can take advantage of less costly space, sell large underutilized properties or move to smaller, more efficient space.
To meet the continual need to maintain our buildings, in FY2015 we completed over 41,000 repair, alteration and replacement projects along with 1,578 upgrades for the Premier Post Office program. We also finished 512 upgrades to maintain customer access in locations impacted by POStPlan, the strategy to modify retail window hours to match customer use. These measures ensure safety, security and serviceability of Postal Service buildings as we maintain and right-size our network to provide a positive customer experience.
The current industry trend of consumer migration away from brick and motor shopping to e-commerce, and the resultant growth in our package business, continue to impact our facilities portfolio management plan. However, the Facilities team continuously innovates and adapts the plan to address these marketplace developments. (See Real Estate Inventory and Real Estate Inventory Actions tables.)
