Growing fast, staying grounded: Ivo Schreurs’ five years as a WDP Property Manager
Ivo Schreurs joined WDP five years ago, expecting that working for a larger, listed company would come with more complexity. He quickly discovered the opposite: a down-to-earth organisation built on short lines of communication, personal relationships and practical solutions. All qualities he hopes WDP holds onto as it keeps growing across Europe.
When I joined WDP 5 years ago
When I started at WDP five years ago, I landed in an oasis of calm. It was August, so pretty much all my Dutch colleagues were somewhere on a campsite in France or Italy. The result? My first week, I was almost alone in the office.
After that, everything picked up quickly. My colleagues welcomed me well, and Willy showed me the ropes at WDP, introducing me to the clients in the part of the portfolio I’d be managing, and taking me around the various buildings.
Martijn Sleutjes was appointed as my mentor for that first period. After about three weeks, I got a phone call.
‘Hey Ivo, it’s Martijn. Just wanted to check you got off to a good start.’
‘Hi Martijn, yes, all good, thanks.’
‘Great, talk soon.’
And that was it.
It might sound like a small detail, but for me, that call said a lot about WDP. Before this, I’d worked at two much smaller organisations, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a bigger, listed company. That phone call put me at ease straight away: thankfully, things here weren’t made any more complicated than they needed to be.
That down-to-earth way of working was also one of the reasons WDP appealed to me in the first place. Because we own our real estate ourselves, the lines are short, and decisions can be made fast. Five years on, that’s still something I value enormously.
What WDP means for me today
Five years later, I still very much enjoy working at WDP. When I started, around 80 people worked at WDP. Since then that number has grown a lot. You can feel in everything that WDP is developing fast. Growth inevitably brings change. Still, I hope we hold onto the qualities that struck me in my first weeks: our down-to-earth attitude, the personal approach, and the idea that you don’t need to make things more complicated than they already are.
WDP approaches clients personally and positively, and clients feel that difference too. That’s something we can be proud of.
How I see WDP in the future
For the years ahead, I mostly hope WDP keeps growing in a healthy, responsible way, without losing sight of the values the De Pauw family built this company on. You notice it, for example, in the way we treat our clients. WDP approaches clients personally and positively, and clients feel that difference too. That’s something we can be proud of.
As property manager in both the Netherlands and Germany, I also get to see up close how hard our German team is working to build out the portfolio there. So I hope those efforts get rewarded in the coming years with some beautiful new buildings, and new opportunities for WDP.
The project I’ll never forget
A project I’ll definitely remember is the tenant switch in our building on Earl Bakkenstraat in Heerlen. With 89,000 m² of space, plus around another 30,000 m² of mezzanines, this was no ordinary handover. The new tenant had high expectations and was also a client of the outgoing tenant, while that outgoing tenant kept renting around 25% of the building.
It became a genuinely intense few months as the deadline approached, both technically and legally. Long discussions, agreements that seemed settled one day and back up for debate the next, deadlines that were just met, or just missed, and every now and then a heated discussion. In the end, we managed to steer the whole process in the right direction.
Looking back, I’m mostly proud that, despite all the different interests, pressure and complexity, we kept looking for solutions. It wasn’t always easy, but maybe that’s exactly why it’s a project I won’t forget any time soon.