A/Prof Chris Heywood

Associate Professor in Property and Management

Biography

Associate Professor Chris Heywood joined the faculty in January 2006 as a lecturer in Property and Management. He is an expert in the importance of managing property to meet business outcomes, particularly when property is not an organisation’s core business – essentially every organisation in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. This expertise spans such discipline areas as corporate real estate management, facility/facilities management and real estate asset management and locates all of these within strategic business management.

He understands property as the conflation of the context (physical, social, and economic), site and building, and the associated rights and value. The physical aspects of property then act as ‘containers’ for organisational workplaces and work settings. All these contribute to enabling the space-using organisations’ business outcomes. He understands property as a management activity is as important as property as a physical artefact and as a physical, financial and social asset.

His research interests are consequently diverse but, by preference, focus on qualitative research in the following areas:

Property and life cycles:

  • Property in the life cycle of businesses.
  • Initiating property – property’s originating strategic rationale and purpose, making the business case, and aligning this with the organisational strategy.
  • Post-construction property usage – as a business resource and a physical and financial asset.

Corporate real estate management practices:

  • Documenting and refining the body of knowledge as domains of practice and individual practices.
  • Practices that enable business outcomes.
  • Modelling CREM practices.
  • Local and global practice.
  • Strengthening the theoretical and practical bases of CREM professionalism.

People in managing property to meet business objectives:

  • People’s subjective assessments (perceptions) and use of judgements, like heuristics.
  • Users’ experiences of management practices.
  • Psychology and property’s management practices.
  • Relationships between an organisation’s people, property and business outcomes.

He collaborates internationally with researchers in these areas and has, as of mid-2014, ongoing collaborations with Aalto University in Finland, and Delft Technical University in The Netherlands. Previous collaborations have included the University of Greenwich and University of Salford.

Recent and significant research projects include:

  • Strategic alignment modelling (ongoing international collaboration).
  • The role of affect in local government corporate real estate management (my doctorate).
  • Corporate real estate and organisational competitiveness (as a Research Fellow).
  • Life cycle modelling of sustainable building upgrades to real estate assets (co-Chief Investigator).
  • Relocation practices of organisations (collaboration in the REPBU relocation research project at Aalto University).
  • Public housing asset management assets (co-Investigator)
  • Branding in corporate real estate management to improve our understanding of its role in organisations (supervised doctorate).
  • Occupier thermal comfort in an office building’s mixed-mode spaces (supervised doctorate).
  • Market value and sustainable properties (supervised doctorate).
  • The 4 Ps - People, public, private and partnerships (2 co-supervised doctorates).

Disciplines

Property

Research directions

Data and Value Practice and Construction Innovation

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