You can imagine the weekend John Forrester endured. Hoping to reveal the fireworks of a takeover, by Monday all he was able to deliver was a bonfire of DTZ’s share price.
It was the listing rules that forced his hand yesterday of course, necessitating a humiliating stock exchange announcement that there was no value left in the business.
Today Forrester was able to deliver the news that he would have hoped to have been able to deliver yesterday. And in announcing the takeover offer from UGL he may well have gone from zero to hero.
There will be integration pains ahead, no doubt. Clients and staff will be lost. But Forrester deserves credit for persevering, for remaining optimistic and for stepping up at a time when his colleagues and the business need him to.
Of course, the detractors will go into overdrive. UGL are Aussie bog cleaners, they will say. What do they know about transactional work and high-value property advice? They are no CBRE, no JLL and no Cushmans, runs the implication. There’s an irony in that. While many observers inside and outside DTZ have long seen Cushman & Wakefield as a natural partner, the UGL deal sees DTZ leapfrog Cushmans to assume fourth place in the Estates Gazette global league table.
What UGL does know better than most is how to build a global business. This was something that DTZ had begun to deliver but failed to capitalise upon.
With the entire global real estate industry looking East and racking up enough air miles to circumnavigate the globe several times over, it seemed like madness yesterday that DTZ’s share price had sunk to a shade over 2p. This, after all, is a firm with a stronger foothold than any other in China and beyond.
Australian companies have a deservedly better reputation than those in the West for seeing the opportunity in the Asian tiger economies and capitalising on it. They may just have done so again.
