FM market research review: do we really have the "intelligence"?

Introduction

For the past 15 years, facilities management (FM) industry has gone through tremendous changes, in which the FM market has benefited greatly. Responding to the buoyant market, FM market research has also grown from little or no reports to about a dozen publically available market publications. However, as the recognitions of the scopes and definitions of FM are considerably different among market research agencies, there are huge disparities among the estimated sizes and forecasts. More importantly, each of the leading research agencies has some problems with their research methods which can cast doubts on their findings. This paper tries to investigate what are the common problems with the main publications, and attempts to propose a different research methodology that focuses FM market research on the demand side of the market.

The Centre for Facilities Management (CFM) is one of the oldest research bodies specialised in the FM field, with its first UK market report published in 1992. Since then, we have been using a consistent research methodology, regularly updating market intelligence data, trends and FM organisation characteristics. Through this, CFM has built up a market intelligence database. This fact might not be well-known because most of the publications are only available to CFM member organisations. In the past five years, CFM has also expanded its market intelligence database to continental Europe, Australia, South East Asia and North America through CFM's research network. These research activities have made CFM one of the leading FM market intelligence experts in the field.

Of course CFM is not the only FM market research agency. There are a few other FM market research publications that are regularly updated in UK. The following is the list of UK leading agencies with their latest publications:

- AMA - FM Outsourcing UK Market 2006 .

- Building Services Research and Information Association ([4] BSRIA, 2006) - Facilities Management UK 2005 .

- CFM - UK FM Market Analysis 2005; and UK Public Sector FM Market Report 2006 ([7], [8] CFM, 2005, 2006).

- i-FM - Trends and Opportunities 2008 .

- Market & Business Development (MBD) - UK FM Market Research Report 2007 .

- [22] Mintel (2007) - FM (Industrial Report) UK 2007 .

There are also a few market...