JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL REAL ESTATE AND CONSTRUCTION STUDIES, Vol 1, No 2, pp 167 - 182 2011 AN EXAMINATION OF THE PRACTICE OF F ACILITIES MANAGEMENT IN NIGERIA Timothy Tunde Oladokun Department of Estate Management Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife - Nigeria ABSTRACT While the multi disciplinary nature of the practice of facilities management (FM) enhances access to requisite professional inputs, the public perception as an “all comers affair” poses a challenge of competence on practitioners. The aim of this paper is to examine the professional background of practising facilities managers in Nigeria. The aim is pursued to ensure that the image of the profession, as being run by competent professionals is rightly portrayed to the public who are consumers of its services. The quantitative research methodology was adopted and primary data was collected via questionnaires administered to 150 practising facility managers in Lagos State and was analysed with the aid of descriptive statistics. The study revealed the multidisciplinary nature of FM: estate surveyors and valuers (32%), architects (26%), engineers (19%) and quantity surveyors (23%). It has shown that a majority (39%) of the respondents have between six to 10 years of working experience. Others have as follows: less than 5 years (19%), between 16 and 20 years (12%), more than 21 years (1%) of the total respondents. This shows that the younger generation professionals (58%) currently dominate the practice. The study established that 45%, 20%, 65%, 16%, 6%, and 13% of the respondents have handled between 11 and 20, less than 10, less than 20, between 21 and 30, between 31- 40 and more than 40 FM jobs respectively. It has also been established that FM can be best practiced by adopting information standardisation, acquisition of more relevant trainings by practitioners as well as the practice performance benchmarking. It is concluded that FM is an interdisciplinary profession, which is currently at its infancy stage in the country and the industry is dominated by young professionals in the built environment. The implication is that the profession needs effective nurturing to enable it to develop into a mature stage as being currently observed in the developed economies like UK and USA. Keywords: Facilities management, multi-disciplinary, practice 1. INTRODUCTION The discipline of facilities management (FM) is still considered to be evolving (Bell, 1992; Nutt, 1999; Mudrak et al., 2004; Goyal and Pitt, 2007). Thus, the practice of FM is still a new concept to many African countries like Nigeria. Many of these developing countries have not yet been benefiting from the advantages derivable from the practice of FM. A related activity, which has hitherto been known and commonly embraced, is the art of property management. This act involves the application of knowledge to care for the building and its components with the