CHICAGO- DTZ has announced a reorganization of their research arm including the appointment of Chicago-based Executive Vice President John Wickes as the head of the North American research department. The move will unify researchers who had worked for DTZ, which was acquired by UGL in late 2011 and Equis, a Chicago company bought by UGL in 2006.
“Sharing research was something we were all doing informally, trading data and so forth,” says Wickes, so in one sense the reorganization will just solidify existing procedures. But Wickes says they will still make big changes.
“Most of our energies are going to be devoted to thought leadership,” he explains, and providing the commercial real estate world with market forecasts rather than data analysis, although they will continue to do market reports. “People are craving the forward thinking pieces,” he adds, primarily because the slow and complicated recovery, which has had so many starts and sidesteps, has left so many unsure of the future. “You can read market reports all day long and not be any wiser. We want to give new insights, a forward-thinking view of the market, so when you pick [the research] up you're not looking in the rear view mirror.”
Wickes also has plans to expand the research department's reach. He will supervise the DTZ research teams in Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, L.A. and three cities in Canada but says they will also move into other cities. They have not, however, decided which ones. “That's still on the drawing board.”
Last December, another DTZ official told GlobeSt.com that two of their main goals were “the expansion of the DTZ footprint across all major cities throughout the Americas, including Canada and Latin America,” and ensuring “that there's true integration among all of our lines of business.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
