CHICAGO—As of the start of this week, Cassidy Turley and DTZ are operating as a single brand, both having been acquired by an investment consortium led by TPG Capital, PAG Asia Capital and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. The combination, in short, changes everything while at the same time providing a pretty seamless fit, Americas chief executive Joseph Stettinius Jr. and global CEO Tod Lickerman tell GlobeSt.com.

“It's not about our companies being able to do anything we weren't able to do before last week; it's about scale around the world,” says Lickerman. “It's about being able to go where you need to go to service the clients.”

Adds Stettinius, “The market has demonstrated that there's a demand for additional full service, global services providers that can deliver sophisticated services consistently across markets and across service lines. The thing that binds us all together is the universal vision of that opportunity.”

A big differentiator for the combined DTZ—one that held true prior to the combination but even more so now—is that “we're coming in with deep and longstanding relationships in the local markets,” says Stettinius. “Our ability to take those relationships and deploy them around the world, as opposed to just around a country or a region, provides a tremendous opportunity for our people and the ability to do an even better job for our clients.”

For both organizations, the combination provided an overnight growth opportunity in regions where each was lacking. DTZ brought “robust legacy businesses” to the mix—for example, it's the number one firm for investment sales transactions in China and the third largest in the UK—“but it's still pretty nascent in the US market,” says Stettitnius. Cassidy Turley's initial focus was on delivering services across geographies and service lines across the US, “but we understood that eventually we would need the global capability.”

It's not only global scale but also speed that the combined organization intends to ramp up. “The real estate industry has been behind the curve in terms of speed of execution relative to transactions or deployment of services,” Stettinius says. “And that's because we're behind the curve in terms of technology. One of the things that both Tod and I are committed to doing is deploying a suite of technology tools that will allow us to really deploy services in real time, just like other financial services industries around the world. In all candor, I don't think those have been available to this industry until very recently.”

Along with recruitment of key new team members, integration of the existing workforce will be a key priority over the next 12 months. “There will be a lot of effort toward getting people to understand the platform, getting to understand their colleagues and getting to know one another,” says Stettinius. “Outside of the US, while the introduction of the consortium will be a big event for the company, their day-to-day lives won't change very much. Within the US, we need to integrate Cassidy Turley into DTZ on a person-by-person, office-by-office, market-by-market basis.”

The good news about the fit between DTZ and Cassidy Turley, Lickerman says, is that “there's relatively little overlap. So this isn't a difficult integration from that point of view, because Cassidy brings a critical mass to the United States. It becomes the DNA of DTZ in the US.”