LOS ANGELES—It's been a year of large-scale successes for the Global Workplace Solutions platform at CBRE Group that resulted from CBRE's $1.475-billion acquisition of the GWS business from Johnson Controls Inc. and integration with its own Global Corporate Services line. During that time, the facilities management team successfully combined a 15,000-employee organization (GWS) with a 24,000-employee organization (GCS) in three regions encompassing over 600 clients and five service lines. The integration also expanded the combined platform's global portfolio of managed properties and facilities by nearly half, from 3.7 billion square feet to 5.2 billion square feet.

The GWS team has done all of this, says COO John Murphy, “in a way that remained steadfastly focused on serving our clients and beginning to realize the promise and strategic benefits of the merger itself.” President of the GCS business at JCI before its integration into CBRE, Murphy adds, “The most important ingredient in all of this has been the incredible professionalism of our employees and leaders around the world who began this journey with a lot of enthusiasm and over the course of the past year have continued to build on that enthusiasm in bringing the two organizations together.”

Ultimately, though, client satisfaction is the real test, he says. “If you look at our client satisfaction scores throughout the process, they've continued to improve substantially. If you look at the success we've had in renewing and expanding our relationships with existing customers, it's been tremendous. Finally, we've been successful at securing a number of new client relationships as well.”

The figures speak for themselves. The CBRE GWS group signed more than 200 outsourcing contracts in the first half of 2016, including 89 new clients and 76 expansions. The group now works with 90 companies in the Fortune 100, and has seen contractual fee revenue as a percent of total fee revenue grow from 21% in 2006 to 41% in the first half of this year.

Due to the integration, CBRE's facilities management service offering has been materially strengthened, with greater ability to meet the full spectrum of occupier needs. These include leasing and sales transactions, facilities management, project management and construction services and technical engineering and consulting across a wide range of industries.

Since the integration, GWS clients have not gravitated toward any one particular aspect of the platform, Murphy says. “It's our ability to now credibly and substantively be able to work with our clients across the life cycle of the portfolio. In the past, each of our legacy organizations would face limitations in the breadth of services we could provide to a client and therefore serve them not only across the entire life cycle but also virtually anywhere in the world that they are.”

The platform now can provide not only facilities management to clients, “but also help them in terms of their real estate strategies: where should their facilities be, should they own them, should they lease them, how do they get more productivity out of their facilities and create more value for their occupants,” says Murphy. “So our ability to work with our clients on a very strategic basis across the entire life cycle of their portfolio, and the ability for one firm to credibly and reliably serve them, and bring them counsel and execute on the opportunities, has really been the do-different in all of this.”

Instant Insights /

Working Across a Portfolio's Life Cycle

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