Toronto-based property management firm FirstService Corp plans to spin off Colliers International into its own billion-dollar independent publicly traded company, part of a strategy founder/CEO Jay Hennick says FirstService has had since acquiring Colliers about a decade ago. “We wanted to do it slowly, so (Colliers) would have the scale to be a standalone public company,” he tells Bisnow. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of Q2.
Jay, who will maintain control of Colliers as executive chairman, sees tremendous opportunity for the third-largest global publicly traded CRE firm (after CBRE and JLL) to expand within its fragmented $150B industry, in which the top players account for just 14% of its business. Being independent should increase Colliers’ visibility to investors who previously were focused on FirstService, Jay says. And the separation will enable publicly traded FirstService, with $1.1B in revenue last year, to improve margins and refine a “disciplined acquisition growth strategy,” the firm said in a release.
