Dave Dochter and Matt Alexander leave Cushman to start new retail firm

Retail brokers Dave Dochter and Matt Alexander are no longer with Cushman & Wakefield and plan to launch their own brokerage, Dochter confirmed Friday.

The pair — who worked together at Cushman the past five years — don’t have a name finalized for their new company but expect to announce one shortly. They plan to open an office on F Street NW in the East End of downtown D.C., Dochter said.

Click here for our Dealmaker profile on Dochter.

The split from Cushman was effective Thursday.

“We…

How an expert describes Inova's financial position: ‘Crazy’ and ‘insane.’ As in insanely good.

Inova Health System clearly has a reputation for a healthy balance sheet.

When I asked around in October whether local experts believed Fairfax-based Inova could afford the 117-acre Exxon Mobil campus across the street from its flagship Fairfax hospital, the answer was an emphatic yes.

Inova’s financial figures for 2014, which became available this week and show Exxon Mobil will pay $180 million for the campus, did little to temper expectations.

One number in particular stands out: Inova’s 640…

Congressional, American bank merger still moving forward; no word on Plack's status

The merger of Congressional Bancshares and American Bank Holdings is moving forward, bank and regulatory sources say, though time is running out to close the deal by the end of this quarter, as first announced six months ago.

What bank officials and regulators won’t talk about, however, is the fate of American CEO James Plack.

Last fall, the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency filed a notice of charges to remove the executive, bar him from banking and make him pay a $250,000 fine.…

Navy and Pentagon credit unions add employees, hold down compensation costs

Northern Virginia-based Navy Federal Credit Union and Pentagon Federal Credit Union are doing a better than average job of holding down employee costs, even as they add new staffers.

That’s the picture that emerges from data I requested from SNL Financial, plus my review of additional information from the National Credit Union Administration.

A recent SNL analysis found median salary and benefit expenses as a percentage of assets at U.S. credit unions was 1.72 percent at the end of 2014. That’s…

Cost creep continues to plague defense acquisition programs

The overall size of the Pentagon’s portfolio of major defense acquisition programs went down in fiscal 2014, with the total price tag the lowest it’s been in a decade. But a new report shows those numbers are not as promising as they appear.

First, the good news: The estimated cost of the Defense Department’s 2014 portfolio of 78 major weapon system acquisition programs is $90 billion less than the 2013 portfolio of 80 programs, according to a nearly 200-page report from the Government Accountability…