Building users, owners and service providers: New relations and their effects

Corporate real estate management has undergone important changes in many countries. In recent years, companies have increasingly sold their facilities to external independent investors or placed their real estate in semi-independent subsidiaries. Both manufacturing companies and real estate companies increasingly prefer to buy facilities management (FM) services from external contractors. This implies that new relations between users, owners and service providers emerge, where roles are separated in different legal entities without ownership links and are related to each other by explicit and formal contracts. This paper describes the Swedish development and discusses consequences for roles, relations and decision processes. Three key research areas are identified: how space supply and service management may be related to strategic levels of the core business, management of formal and informal aspects of interfirm relations over time, and decision-making in the area of flexibility, generality and user adaptation of workspace