ResearchAndMarkets.com’s recently released Australian facility management market report identified four key growth opportunities for stakeholders: environmentally sustainable practices, analytics adoption, building performance optimization, and standards focus.
The study arranges data by engagement type, service type, and end-user verticals. The study covers the period 2018-2026, with 2020 being the base year.
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 caused significant disruption in the Australian FM market, with negative growth, and is expected to remain negative in 2021. According to the publisher, the FM market will show stable growth in 2022 as the economy recovers and will hopefully fully recover by 2025/2026.
The main drivers of FM services in Australia are new infrastructure, hygiene awareness, and smart and sustainable building design. However, market development has been hampered by reduced facility operations and work-from-home (WFH) policies. This is due to service commoditization, fierce competition, margin pressures, and the reliance on FM service delivery in-house due to the lack of an outsourcing culture. Commercial office occupiers have had to reduce their office footprint due to WFH practices.
COVID-19 has made hygiene a priority, increasing the demand for surface cleaning solutions and hand sanitizers. Moreover, it has increased access control technologies, automated stations for sanitizing, people flow analysis, and safety compliance checks. There has also been an increase in staff security to ensure crowd control and the widespread enforcement of social distancing.
Healthcare facilities will offer more FM service provider opportunities, from reactive maintenance to more strategic operations and maintenance. The rate of outsourcing within Australia’s FM is high at over 60% of the total market; nevertheless, businesses still prefer to maintain an in-house FM team.
Market penetration of integrated facility management (IFM) represented more than 20%; this provides an excellent standard penetration rate in the FM market. Notably, owners of large premises want to achieve scalability and consolidation of services, as IFM contracts can provide long-term cost savings.
