In his first appearance testifying before members of the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump’s new General Services Administration head told lawmakers that his team is focused on creating new federal neighbors to free up buildings to sell.

Testifying on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Edward Forst — the former CEO of brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield who was sworn in as GSA administrator in December — told lawmakers that the GSA has three or four different opportunities to colocate agencies in buildings together.

“I am very optimistic right now about several conversations that we have underway where we will have two agencies combined in the same space,” he told the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management.

“We’ve lived in a world of sovereignties where each agency needs its own building, its own fax machine, its own everything,” he said. “And I’m now quite heartened by the fact that we have three or four possible combinations, one of them in the headquarters building of my agency.”

The “twinning” strategy, as Forst called it, will help speed along the process of offloading some of the most distressed properties in the federal portfolio, sales that he hopes will unlock cash that can then be put back into the rest of its owned portfolio.

But despite hundreds of buildings being listed as targeted for sale at one point last year, he said the government’s real estate arm is taking a more deliberate approach under his leadership.

“We do not have a grand plan for the disposition at this point,” he said. “We are looking at buildings that are not needed, and we’re trying to be more expeditious about realizing return on those and moving the people out of underutilized real estate into areas, collaborating together so we have more density of usage, because that’s an intelligent design as well.”

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