Real estate professional services company JLL recently announced an agreement to acquire Boston-based Building Engines, a building operations platform, the former said in a release.
JLL will acquire Building Engines for a cash purchase price of approximately $300 million. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Building Engines’ cloud platform serves as a system that “unites all the technology and applications” used to run buildings in one place, simplifying interactions between building tenants, management and staff, according to JLL.
“Building Engines joining JLL represents JLL’s continued commitment to technology leadership and bringing the best technology to our investor clients,” said Sharad Rastogi, president at JLL Technologies (JLLT), a division of JLL. “Together, JLL and Building Engines will accelerate the digital transformation of buildings worldwide.”
Jay Koster, President of Investor Services, Americas for JLL, added: “The combination of JLL’s expertise in managing buildings, Building Engines’ leading building operations software platform and JLLT’s CRE technology leadership will accelerate the transition of property operations from manual and reactive activities to technology-informed, automated or digitized activities.”
Building Engines serves more than 1,000 clients who rely on its platform to manage critical operational needs across more than 3 billion square feet and 35,000 properties worldwide. Additionally, the platform’s open API infrastructure features more than 30 integrations with other building operations tools, unifying an increasingly fragmented set of building operations applications into a single user experience for all property managers.
“The building operations software landscape has become highly fragmented, leading to a disconnected experience for investors, operators, tenants and occupants. Our open platform and growing suite of product modules aims to solve this,” said Tim Curran, CEO of Building Engines.
JLL has operations in over 80 countries and a global workforce of more than 92,000 as of June 30, 2021.
Earlier this year, JLL announced the release of JLL Azara, which is a corporate real estate data and insights platform.
The new platform was developed by JLL Technologies (JLLT), a business division of JLL that is dedicated to commercial real estate (CRE) technology.
JLL Azara supports the “complete real estate lifecycle” across three categories: Portfolio optimization, facilities and operations, and space and workplace management. In the future, JLL Azara will expand to cover additional categories such as energy measurement and management.
The company also noted that all relevant real estate systems, including ERP, IWMS, IoT and CRE applications, can integrate into the new platform.
