Data Centres

Investment potential with sustainability challenges

Demand for high-performance data centres has increased tremendously in recent years. An understanding of both the latest trends and specific needs of the industry is essential to provide professional advice to investors and operators of data centres.

Progressive digitisation and the increase in data exchange require ever greater server capacity, and the growth in data centres is correspondingly large, making this development particularly interesting for investors. However, space in city centres is scarce and data centre activity is expected to shift to outlying locations. Not only are operators competing with other asset classes for the available space; they also face sustainability challenges. The energy requirements of data centres are huge, and climate-friendly concepts will have to be developed in future – these include power-to-heat solutions in which the waste heat from operating servers is fed into the district heating network.

Flexible and scalable

As the world's leading real estate service provider, we manage more than 6.5 million sq m of space in over 800 data centres. With 6,000 data centre specialists in over 600 locations, we know exactly what matters. Our Advisory & Transaction Services experts work with our clients to develop flexible and scalable computing and data centre solutions, regardless of size, reach and location. In so doing, we always have regard to the latest trends such as cloud hosting, managed services and co-location. We also operate a digital DCS platform, where we bundle our know how from numerous projects and use it to benefit our clients. CBRE’s network is unique in the world, and allows us to find the right landlord for your co-location space needs quickly and efficiently.

Extensive services for investors and operators

Our consultants cover the entire range of services in the computing and data centre field. For example, we support investors with comprehensive transaction and investment advice, including the valuation process, risk assessment and financing strategies. Our experienced project managers implement complex new construction projects on time and take care of developer responsibilities. We also cover every service in the environmental consulting field, and offer tenants and occupiers consulting services ranging from requirements analysis and capacity planning to optimising ongoing processes, thus ensuring that our clients always receive an individually tailored real estate concept for their data centre.

• Investors: for institutional investors, data centres are an attractive and high-performance investment alternative to traditional commercial real estate. Our specialists in the areas of Capital Markets, Valuation Advisory Services and Data Centre Investor Services deal with every issue relating to the purchase and sale of data centres. Besides comprehensive building assessment, this includes risk analysis and environmental assessments to take account of possible contamination. Through our Building Consultancy Project Management business line we also offer specialist data centre project management. In the Corporate Real Estate Management field, we broker sale-and-leaseback transactions and advise in detail on contract structures. Each year we advise on transactions worth more than $1 billion worldwide. We also assist our clients in structuring their investments and arrange financing. For existing properties and portfolios, our Commercial Property Management experts take on every task in relation to administration and management - from traditional asset and property management to coordinating facility management.
• Operators: we offer data centre and co-location operators individually tailored location advice and a full range of real estate brokerage services. Besides the search for and selection of suitable space, we also use outsourcing partnerships to optimise our cross-border services. The services offered by our CBRE Global Workplace Solutions (GWS) network include integrated facility and project management. Often, our GWS experts use technical and commercial management programmes to achieve a reduction in electricity and operating costs and an overall saving of around 20 percent, whilst also reducing human risk factors by up to 80 percent. We also ensure transparency in every important process - whether IT-related, or part of facility management. GWS project managers also coordinate complex conversions for every type of data centre.

Our Data Centre Solutions services:

• Assistance with purchase and sale processes
• Sale-and-leaseback
• Valuations
• Planning and construction project management (Whitespace Fit-Out)
• Risk management
• Land searches and acquisition
• Co-location capacity brokerage
• Facility management and Integrated Data Centre Operations
• Technical services (maintaining building services and ICT services) and year-round, 24/7 operation
• Energy and sustainability consulting