Real Estate Commercial Leads

Commercial Strategy & Leadership

• Own and drive the full commercial strategy for the UK region, ensuring alignment with corporate objectives, investment expectations, and long-term portfolio value.
• Provide senior leadership into business cases, feasibility studies, bid strategies, cost benchmarking, and investment committee submissions.
• Oversee the governance framework, ensuring robust controls, accuracy, transparency, and consistency across all projects.
• Act as the regional commercial authority, challenging assumptions, validating cost positions, and ensuring strategic commercial integrity across the lifecycle.

Cost Management & Financial Control

• Provide executive oversight of cost planning, forecasting, value engineering, and financial performance across all live and pipeline projects.
• Ensure rigorous cost validation, driving commercial efficiency through design optimisation, procurement strategy, and supply chain performance.
• Lead monthly commercial reporting cycles, delivering senior-level insights on risk, opportunity, exposure, and budget performance.
• Steward regional CAPEX governance, ensuring investments remain within approved parameters and deliver expected returns.
• Partner with Finance to ensure robust cashflow forecasting, accrual accuracy, and disciplined financial close-out processes.

Procurement & Contract Management

• Shape and govern the regional procurement strategy, ensuring alignment to commercial outcomes, supply chain resilience, and project delivery needs.
• Lead high-value contract negotiations, ensuring commercial terms appropriately balance risk, performance incentives, and delivery certainty.
• Drive standardisation of contract forms, commercial templates, procurement processes, and cost databases across the region.
• Build and maintain strategic supplier relationships, championing performance management and long-term value creation across the supply chain.

Risk & Change Management

• Provide senior oversight of the commercial risk register, ensuring proactive risk identification, quantification, mitigation, and communication.
• Govern regional change control processes, ensuring all variations are properly evaluated, negotiated, and approved in accordance with governance standards.
• Deliver clear and timely commercial impact assessments to support strategic decision-making and portfolio reporting.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of commercial and cost managers, promoting a culture of accountability, excellence, and commercial ownership.
• Act as the senior commercial interface with internal partners — Procurement, Asset Management, Development, Design, Delivery, Operations, Finance, and Legal — ensuring alignment of commercial priorities.
• Represent the commercial function in Project Steering Groups, Investment Committees, and regional leadership forums.
• Drive continuous improvement across commercial processes, systems, reporting, and governance to support scalable growth across European markets.

Qualifications & Experience

• Degree in Quantity Surveying, Commercial Management, Construction Economics, or equivalent.
• Significant commercial management experience, ideally within data centre (ESSENTIAL FOR UK), industrial, real estate development, or mission-critical infrastructure environments.
• Demonstrated success in client-side or developer-side roles managing commercial outcomes across multi-project, multi-market portfolios.
• Strong knowledge of European procurement processes, contract forms (NEC, FIDIC, or local equivalents), and key cost drivers.
• Proven experience building and leading high-performing teams.
• Advanced skills in commercial analysis, negotiation, reporting, and executive communication.

Key Attributes

• Strategically minded, commercially astute, and financially disciplined, with a strong execution mindset.
• Confident operating at senior leadership level, influencing stakeholder groups across functions.
• Capable of balancing strategic oversight with hands-on commercial problem-solving when required.
• Collaborative, proactive, and solution-oriented, with a focus on value creation and commercial performance.

What we offer:

Colt DCS is a growing business that is investing in its people.

We offer skill development, learning pathways and accreditation to help our people perform at their best, regardless of role and location.

In addition to offering competitive salaries and incentive plans, a range of benefits and local rewards packages are offered to staff.

Colt DCS recognises and is committed to the importance of a work-life balance.