Pan-European Facility Management: "Europe's FM Pie"

Last December, the Magazine "Property EU" published an article about the trend for outsourcing facilities services across Europe. As a European Facility Management leader, Faceo brought its contribution to this article.

The article starts with this statement: there is a real trend for European groups to outsource their facilities services within the frame of pan-European Facility Management contracts. FM has become increasingly attractive in the current globalisation context, where "cost cutting" and "added value" are keywords. According Property EU, Experts confirmed this success of Facilities Management activities: they estimated that Facility Management sector turnover in Europe raised by 20% to 30% over the last 3 years.

The only downside of cross-European contracts consists in "challenges in terms of different languages, cultures, regulations and business mindsets", explains Property EU. As a result, according to Amaury de Varax (Business Development and Marketing Director of Faceo), "the attractions for European multinationals are more difficult to assess. Many European companies have not yet put in place a centralised real estate organisation. They operate as independent profit centres and Facilities Management is run locally by their local affiliates".

However, the pan-European Facility Management trend remains strong enough to make evolve the FM market in Europe. Players from real estate industry and FM service providers have been evolving in the supply chain. Large real estate firms have developed a "real estate asset management model" for Facilities Management operations, to benefit from significant success of FM (FM activities represent a potential increase in contractual revenue for brokers, while real estate market is slowing down); and facilities service providers have improved their reach and capabilities. Players have extended their scope of services (utilities management, construction...) to meet pan-European needs; and have established alliances and JV to provide their services over a large geography.

As a conclusion, we can assume that the Facilities Management sector tends to be more and more multi-country oriented: as Property EU named it; the provision of pan-European Services stands for “the Holy Grail of FM outsourcing”.

By contributing to this article, Faceo reinforced its position as a FM provider specialised in pan-European solutions. Indeed, multi-country FM delivery across Europe is one of the essential added-value of our offer.