SEATTLE-For an essentially local business, commercial real estate is a big ticket item when it comes to the national GDP. That was the upshot of a press conference held here Monday during the BOMA Every Building Conference. Stephen. S. Fuller, the George Mason University professor who authored the report, was full of eye-popping stats on the contribution of the office sector to the national economic picture.

“For each dollar of office building expenditures,” he told the accumulated press, “the US economy gains $2.57.” And for every one of those dollars, nearly 20 jobs not related to the building itself are supported.

Putting that into terms of only BOMA’s representative buildings, which is impressive in itself at 9.9 billion square feet, Fuller noted that the average cost of management comes to a little over $8 per foot. That tallies to a total expenditure of $79 billion, which in turn contributed $205 billion to the GDP and 1.6 million indirect jobs supported.

When it comes to the workers in those office buildings, there are some 45 million represented in BOMA buildings alone. Each one of them contributes $116,200 to the GDP. When all of the factors are calculated, office real estate contributed $15 trillion—nearly 1/3 of the economy.

And that’s just office, Fuller said. Retail workers contribute $9,800 each to the GDP. Hotel workers sank $34,600 and industrial leads the pack at $139,000. So while deals are done on an individual basis, commercial real estate in a very real sense is much more than a local concern.