|
UK: CORPORATES GEAR UP TO SPIN OUT OF CONTROL.
Europroperty
1 Mar 2000
Shareholder pressure may finally provoke some property spin-off action from European companies.
Some ideas are of their time. With others, the idea has always been sound but the world is not yet ready. This seems to have been the case with the divestment of real estate from corporates.
"Spin-off" has now become a familiar term in any European language and while companies could have made more efficient use of their large portfolios this time last decade, it is only now that it is creeping closer to the top of the corporate agenda.
If one is to believe the advisory side of the property industry, the sector is in for a tremendous shift of property from the occupier to the investment community. As Denis Kavanagh, international director and chairman of global services management at Jones Lang LaSalle, said at a recent conference in Berlin. "If in the 1990s, the property markets were shaped by money, this new decade will be shaped by the corporate - the occupier - working with that money."
The structural implications for the industry are massive. If one imagines the sector in a decade's time, it is likely that - above and beyond the predicted consolidation - Europe will also have a handful of new players who have grown through garnering large portfolios from corporates, recognising the sea change towards providing an outsourced solutions. They may even grow quicker and more profitably than traditional quoted companies who fail to recognise the vibes from occupiers to provide a more active property management service.
"I think it is one of the most exciting developments likely to hit property and construction. Other industries have changed gradually - property has been fixed in the 1960s. Since that time there has been no reinvention of the product. There is now huge pressure in a short time period for corporately acceptable ways of occupying space," says Oliver Jones, managing director of Citex, the Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette-backed service company.
<<Back
|
