DTZ Launches Latin American Operations with Opening of Mexico City Office

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Guillermo Sepulveda, DTZ

Global property services firm DTZ has opened its Latin American regional headquarters, in Mexico City, the company announced late last week.

Veteran CRE executive Guillermo Sepulveda will be president of DTZ in Latin America and Mexico, Emile Sarraf will be COO, and the two will together oversee DTZ’s Latin American and Mexico business operations.

In addition, senior vice president Alfredo Armendariz will continue to lead the DTZ Global Occupier Services team in the region.

The new office’s team will cover tenant representation; agency leasing, project, property and facility management; real estate consulting; and appraisals in the office, industrial and retail sectors.

“Strong growth in Latin America and cross-border economic activity has created a demand for top-quality commercial real estate and facility management services in the region, and DTZ’s global clients are very active in Latin America,” DTZ global CEO Tod Lickerman said in a release.

In his 25-year career, Sepulveda has held executive leadership positions with JLL and CBRE. As senior vice president at JLL from 2000 to 2006, he was responsible for creating and consolidating the construction, project and facility management divisions for Mexico. He also served as managing director of CBRE Mexico from 2008 to 2009, leading a 250-member team across five offices. More recently Sepulveda was an executive vice president of Coldwell Banker Commercial, where he was in charge of the Corporate Services operations.

Sepulveda earned an architecture degree from the Universidad LaSalle in Mexico City and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. He speaks Spanish, English and Portuguese.

Sarraf has held prominent corporate roles leading teams in Mexico and Latin America for GE, American Express, Citibank and more recently for Grupo Salinas. He holds a degree in civil engineering from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and also studied at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is a Six-Sigma Green Belt and speaks Spanish, English, Arabic and French.

Sepulveda is upbeat about opportunities in Mexico, he told Commercial Property Executive, citing such factors as the establishment of Mexico’s first REITs in 2011; new auto plants by Mazda, Honda, Audi and BMW; and the rapid growth (almost 20 percent annually) of the aerospace/defense industry in Mexico.

“The opportunity for DTZ lies in both participating in the consolidation of the Latin American real estate market and in servicing its expanding client base in the region,” he concluded.