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Joining Knight Frank from CBRE, where he was Director in their Data Centres Solutions team, Ben has over 15 years of experience within the data centres sector and will be at the vanguard of further developing the firm’s global data centres offer, to concentrate on this fast-growing market and Knight Frank’s strong occupier and capital markets capabilities.
Knight Frank’s data centres team is a core part of the firm’s global service line, enhancing its well-established centre of excellence in the US and drawing on its wide-reaching international network. The team specialises in investment, site transactions and occupier advisory, providing data centres market insight around the globe and work closely with Knight Frank’s industrial and land teams, capitalising on the firm’s commercial and land expertise.
William Beardmore-Gray, Global Head of Occupier Services and Commercial Agency at Knight Frank, said: “Ben’s appointment cements our strategy to provide our global client base with unrivalled commercial opportunities internationally combined with market-leading insight. He will play a crucial role in further building our global remit, working closely with our international occupier and capital markets teams.
“Ben has stand-out experience of advising clients in over 100 data centre markets around the world, which places him in the unique position of being able to provide businesses with a technical delivery focus and expert technical advice.”
Ben Stirk, Partner and Co-Head of Global Data Centres at Knight Frank, added: “The data centres market is growing exponentially and it is an exciting time to join Knight Frank and grow the firm’s global offer given the huge levels of demand the sector is experiencing.
“I’m thrilled to join this forward-thinking firm and bring my experience in advising a wide range of multinational corporate organisations globally with my specialism in tenant representation and providing global colocation strategy and advisory. This will be crucial in working closely with my colleagues around the world to provide our occupier and investment clients with an unmatched holistic data centres advisory service.”
Knight Frank’s market-leading data centres team has a strong global presence in the key FLAP-D markets of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Dublin in Europe, the core APAC markets of Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and the main markets in the US, in addition to fast-emerging markets internationally. In the past 12 months the team has traded four data centre development sites with a combined total of 240MW in London, UK; Mumbai, India; Milan, Italy; and Sydney, Australia.
The data centres market has seen significant increased demand over the past year, with take-up in EMEA in 2020 11% higher year-on-year at 701MW. There was also a monumental £23.5bn investment into the sector in 2020, despite the impact of COVID-19, which is over four times the $5 billion annual average figure. Knight Frank expects that the European data centres market will mature and expand over the next year and that 2021 will see at least a 10% increase in Cloud and wholesale take-up levels owing to further adoption and migration to public cloud in the short term.
