National Real Estate Investor
By Beth Mattson-Teig | Jan 16, 2019

The federal government shutdown that is now rapidly approaching the one-month mark is creating both direct and indirect ripple effects on the commercial and residential real estate sectors.

The government shutdown affects those departments that did not already have 2019 spending in place, namely Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Interior, State and Treasury. An estimated 800,000 federal employees have been furloughed or are working without pay, while the stalemate between the two parties has also halted funding to government contractors working with those agencies. Although that shadow workforce of government contractors is more difficult to track, a recent New York Times article reported that the federal government paid out an estimated $465 billion in federal contracts in 2017. Read more.