In 1997, Alstom was demerged from GEC Marconi and floated on the UK, USA and French stock exchanges. Europe wide it held over 6 million square metres of operational facilities in manufacturing, logistics, research and development and offices.

It had no real estate asset management capability. The UK portfolio was 1.2 million square metres. I led a team at Cyril Leonard that was engaged on a retained long term consultancy basis to provide a real estate strategy for the company and established an asset management template in the UK

We created a ‘virtual’ Real Estate Strategy Board chaired by the Country President with the Finance Director, Legal Counsel and HR Director as members and this ‘Board’ has directed all property matters in the UK company for 18 years. This work led to a restructuring and redesign of Alstom’s Europe wide real estate strategy and I acted as consultant to the Company’s headquarters in Paris in shaping this process.

For Alstom I have Project led a multi disciplinary property team at Cyril Leonard which has delivered over £ 130 million of asset realisations in the UK and € 500 million in 6 other EU countries; £ 100 million of development projects and a pipeline of £ 100 million of projects in the UK where Occupational Costs have been reduced by over 40% and all surplus land and buildings disposed of with a proper management database in place for the retained facilities portfolio.

I have been involved in a number of significant M&A transactions advising on the real estate side and been involved in major transformational workplace changes.