First of all, it can take some effort to find a buyer. This effort needs to be expended regardless, and I don't see how it's better to in-source the work to the selling government agency. They are not professional brokers, have little incentive to act quickly or efficiently, and we've already established that they don't have any magical database that makes the buyer obvious. Just let a commercial RE broker handle it like a business would.
Second, you need to settle-up the accounting so it's no longer on the seller's books, and is now on the buyer's books. That means you need to agree to a price. You can skip this because "it's all part of the federal government", but that leaves us with the mess we have now: nobody knows what buildings are being used by whom at what cost. Accounting costs are not waste; otherwise large private (not publicly-traded) companies would fire their accountants. So it seems like the best course of action is to do the same negotiation and accounting work that happens as a part of the sale.
So the buying/selling costs are not a waste, they are money well-spent. It's possible to make them more efficient in special circumstances -- maybe the costs of due diligence, fraud prevention, title insurance, etc. are little or nothing when buying from the federal government. But those special cases can be handled as special cases and there could be a cheaper, quicker path to sell if those circumstances are met.
First of all, it can take some effort to find a buyer. This effort needs to be expended regardless, and I don't see how it's better to in-source the work to the selling government agency. They are not professional brokers, have little incentive to act quickly or efficiently, and we've already established that they don't have any magical database that makes the buyer obvious. Just let a commercial RE broker handle it like a business would.
Second, you need to settle-up the accounting so it's no longer on the seller's books, and is now on the buyer's books. That means you need to agree to a price. You can skip this because "it's all part of the federal government", but that leaves us with the mess we have now: nobody knows what buildings are being used by whom at what cost. Accounting costs are not waste; otherwise large private (not publicly-traded) companies would fire their accountants. So it seems like the best course of action is to do the same negotiation and accounting work that happens as a part of the sale.
So the buying/selling costs are not a waste, they are money well-spent. It's possible to make them more efficient in special circumstances -- maybe the costs of due diligence, fraud prevention, title insurance, etc. are little or nothing when buying from the federal government. But those special cases can be handled as special cases and there could be a cheaper, quicker path to sell if those circumstances are met.