GLOBAL WORKPLACE SOLUTIONSGlobal Real Estate Leader

Products & Solutions

Nick Westley, Global Lead for Real Estate and Project Management, Johnson Controls Global WorkPlace Solutions (GWS)

What route has your career taken?
I spent the first ten years of my career in property development; first with a Boston-based medical office building developer, then with JMB/ Urban Development Company in Los Angeles. I made the move to United Systems Integrators Corp. (USI) in 1995 to capitalize on the growing trend of corporate real estate outsourcing, building its West Coast business before moving into a national role.
Nick Westley

I joined Johnson Controls in 2005 as part of the USI acquisition taking responsibility for driving six lines of business in the Americas, before taking on my current global role developing the strategic growth plans for our global real estate and projects business offerings.

How would your colleagues describe you at work?
Focused, driven, competitive but still fun to have as part of the team.

What do you still want to achieve?
To take our global real estate and projects business to the next level in terms of service delivery capability.

What do you like about working at JCI / how would you describe the culture?
Excellent team; skilled, creative, hard working and highly collaborative.

What real estate services does your team provide? 

  • Transaction management, including both acquisition and disposition services
  • Strategic portfolio planning
  • Lease administration and information management
  • Market research, demographics and GIS analysis.


You might be interested to know these facts about us:

  • We have a team of more than 250 real estate service professionals globally
  • Completed over 5,000 successful acquisition transactions in the last year
  • 5M sq. ft. of excess space successfully disposed of during the same period
  • Executed transactions in over 40 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, India, China, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan
  • Processed more than 50,000 leases through the our Global Knowledge Centre in Manila last year – which received the Global Industry Excellence Award in Service Delivery, at the recent CoreNet Global Awards in March 2009.


Who do we provide these services to? 
We currently support fifty global real estate clients working in the Technology, Life Sciences, Industrial, Finance, Retail, and Media/Communications markets spanning the Americas, EMEA and Asia. This support ranges from providing one or more of our real estate offerings, to a fully integrated solution, incorporating all of our lines of business, as we do with Agilent Technologies globally.


What are the key concerns of your clients? 

  • The need to control and/or reduce cost.
  • Provide a work environment that helps attract and retain employees.
  • Adequately prepare for the future, whether that means growth, stability or shrinkage.


How is Johnson Controls different to the competition?
We differ in four significant ways:

1. We have true fiduciary alignment with our customers. By that I mean that we only represent corporate end users of space and avoid landlord-tenant conflicts of interest that impact many of our competitors.
2. We utilize a “Best in Class” global transaction delivery model. Specifically, we combined dedicated Johnson Controls GWS transaction teams with the best local brokers in a given market to deliver optimum transaction services.
3. We have superior depth and breadth of subject matter expertise. We provide full, end-to-end lifecycle solutions that tap into specific areas of expertise, such as our market leading energy and sustainability service offerings.
4. We offer an enterprise differentiator through being a part of the larger Johnson Controls corporation. This allows us to significantly leverage our global scale and take advantage of our investments in areas such as our award winning Knowledge Center in Manila. Additionally, in these uncertain economic times, our strong and stable balance sheet provides the credibility to stand behind our commitments that our competitors simply can not equal.

What are your key goals for the remainder of the year?
We recently secured a global real estate contract with a major communications firm, so from an operations perspective our focus is on delivering first-class service as we move forward with this relationship.

On the business development side, we have a robust pipeline of new opportunities. We are definitely looking to successfully secure these by the year end!

What one thing could you not live without?
My BlackBerry.

What would people be surprised to know about you?
I was born in Nottingham, England. Earned an A+ in physics as an undergraduate at Cornell University and currently serve on Cornell’s endowment committee.

If you had to choose a completely different career – what would it be?
Professional race car driver.

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