Case Study: Avison-Young achieves rapid expansion (50+ offices in three years) with Dropbox for Business

How Avison-Young opened 50+ offices in 3 years with help from Dropbox for Business

Avison‑Young is a fast‑growing commercial real estate firm founded in 1978 that expanded to dozens of offices across Canada, the US, and Europe. As the company accelerated openings and acquisitions, its practice of provisioning a separate file server for each new office became costly and time‑consuming; with a small IT team and no in‑house help desk, Avison‑Young needed a lean, scalable way to onboard locations and users quickly.

The firm piloted Dropbox for Business in 2011 and rolled it out company‑wide, enabling 250+ users to be up and running in minutes. Teams now collaborate on deals and acquisitions via shared folders, IT overhead and server costs have been reduced, and file backup/recovery is fast and reliable (including recovering 14,000 accidentally deleted files), allowing the company to expand quickly without adding heavy infrastructure.

Avison Young

Lyndal Hanna

Vice President of Information Technology