SINGAPORE-The company growth rate in the Asia Pacific region has also boosted facility and property management, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. The company is seeing about 25% growth in the management sector, including the expansion of facility oversight by 20 million square feet in the first half of 2010.

John Forrest, JLL’s head of corporate solutions in the region, tells GlobeSt.com that the growth rate, as measured by GDP, is at 6% to 7% overall across Asia, including strong gains by China and India. “Our clients are growing every year, expanding into new markets and launching new products. We grow because these new clients come to market, or they decide to outsource formerly in-house functions,” Forrest says.

The company won a strong contract early this year when Telstra, a large Australian telecommunications company, awarded a long-term deal to manage its portfolio of 27 million square feet across 14,000 sites in Australia. The contract included operational management for 10 million square feet. Currently, JLL has 160 million square feet of facilities management business in the region, and 575 million square feet of property management.

Investment banks in Asia are starting to outsource, said Jordi Martin, JLL’s director of integrated facilities management in the region. “We manage more than 45 million square feet of space for banking and finance clients in Asia Pacific – this represents some 75% to 80% of outsourced facilities management in this sector,” he said.

Outsourcing potential is high in office and industrial in the region, according to JLL officials, especially by growing companies. “The level of business sophistication has increased rapidly, and the scale of corporate portfolios has increased significantly,” Forrest says. “We’re even starting to see high-level executives being placed in the region. It used to be global executives were stationed in the home office, but now we’re starting to get senior leadership from global firms locating in the region.”

He says the global companies are using the region as the best place to grow, to hedge against losses in the West. “Where Europe and the US have stalled, companies are looking to Asia to pick up the slack,” Forrest says.