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E. Stopajnik, A. Redlein:
"The Facility Service industry as a driver of the economy";
Talk: The American Real Estate Societey - ARES 35th Annual Meeting, Pheonix, Arizona; 2019-04-09 - 2019-04-13.

The Facility Service (FS) industry is a growing industry. A study (Redlein, Stopajnik, 2017, JFMER) showed that the FS industry grew faster than the rest of economy in the EU and in Germany between 2011 and 2014. Therefore, it can be considered as a driver of economy. The time series ends in 2014, so it is not clear if the FS industry continued its upward trend. Furthermore, there are more comparisons between European countries possible. So the research question is:

How did the outsourced Facility Service sector evolve between 2010 and 2016 in different European countries in comparison to business economy as a whole?

This article presents an answer to this question based on EU statistics and European norms: All services that are necessary to keep buildings up and running and to safeguard their usability are called Facility Services (FS). The European standard EN 15221-4 lists these services. These services are either provided by own employees or are outsourced. To identify the relevant services and industries for FS the EN 15221-4 is used. Eurostat lists economic activities on a detailed level. Those activities are matched with the activities of the EN 15221-4. The selected items of the annual detailed enterprise statistics from Eurostat are used to determine the size of the FS market. Value added at factor cost is selected as a measure for industry size. Based on this approach, the size of the FS industry is estimated and compared to the whole business economy in the EU and in other European countries. The five largest European countries without missing values are selected for the comparison. Then the time series are presented. Furthermore, there will be a comparison of the size of the FS industry in the EU and the US. In this case the number of employees are selected as a measure for the comparison.

Results show that the outsourced FS industry is a very important industry sector in Europe as it accounts for more than 7 percent of business economy in terms of value added in the EU. The time series show that the FS sector behaves very similar to the rest of business economy in most countries and that in some countries the upward trend continues.