Sheila Botting recently joined Avison Young to lead the Americas Professional Services practice, and is a member of Avison Young’s Global Real Estate Executive. Through her executive real estate career, Sheila has led a number of multi-disciplinary real estate teams and assignments across the industry with owners, investors and corporate occupiers alike, earning the reputation as one of the “go to” commercial real estate advisors across the Americas.  For Avison, her mandate is to accelerate growth across the Americas for our professional services platform including corporate real estate, consulting, project management, valuation and real estate & infrastructure advisory. The firm’s recent integration of GVA in Europe provides a substantive platform from which to accelerate Americas growth and marketplace opportunity.

Prior to Avison Young, Sheila was Senior Partner & Canadian Real Estate Leader with Deloitte LLP, and President of Deloitte Real Estate Inc.. In this role, she led many substantive assignments around the globe across both public and private sector including Deloitte’s own corporate real estate strategy and implementation program across Canada. This transformative workplace opportunity resulted in redeveloping the firm’s occupier portfolio of some 2 million sf portfolio along with major developments at Toronto’s Bay Adelaide East tower, Montreal’s Deloitte Tower and others across the country. Her vision and expertise helped Deloitte to transform its “Workplace of the Future”, resulting in significant workplace improvements, productivity gains and cost savings, along with the creation of a prototype “Smart Building/Workplace”. In 2016, Toronto Life named Deloitte Tower Toronto as the “best new office workplace”. As a result, many of the firm’s clients engaged Sheila to transform their own offices and investigate the corporate real estate operating models – including major Canadian financial institutions, government entities and private business. She also led the real estate valuation team and provided valuation leadership across the firm’s vast real estate audit portfolio. One of her major assignments was to work with CDPQ and their investment into Avison Young, which provided a unique opportunity to understand market and growth potential.

Prior to Deloitte, Sheila was Executive Managing Director of Cushman & Wakefield, a leading full services professional firm, and a global partner. Sheila led the Canadian professional services operation including real estate valuation and advisory services for the industry’s largest investors, owners and corporate occupiers. Cushman acquired Royal LePage Commercial Inc. in 2006 where Sheila also held executive positions with this Brookfield owned enterprise.

Credentials

• Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS)
• Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants (FCMC)
• Honorary Accredited Appraiser with the Appraisal Institute of Canada (AACI)
• Member of the University of Guelph’s Real Estate Program Advisory Board
• Former University of Waterloo’s Pragma Council;
• Former Director of Toronto NAIOP and Chair of the REX Awards
• Founding Director of Toronto CREW
• Women’s Leadership member at the Urban Land Institute
• CREW Network Global Most Distinguished Women Award (2017)
• WXN’s Top 100 Most Powerful Woman Award
• BizNow’s most Powerful Commercial Real Estate Women
• Toronto Junior League’s Women at the Top Award.