Building & Sustainability Consulting

Strategic Asset Management

Property owners are now emerging from survival mode and searching for opportunities. 

One of the first steps is evaluation and gaining a better understanding of their existing portfolios, to make the best of what they’ve got – given constraints on availability of finance.  Typically the portfolios are older, B grade and ripe for opportunity.

Strategic Asset Planning provides short, medium and long term views on minimising cost, managing risk and maximising returns through continued due diligence.

There is a positive trend towards this approach starting with understanding baseline data in terms of condition, performance and environmental and regulatory compliance in such a way that is cost effective, meaningful, useable and enduring.  It is vital to know what data needs to be collected and how it should be best used and managed for maximum effect. Continue reading

Where next for the Development Markets ?

Over the past few years, the Australian development market has been severely hit by the credit crisis by the reduction in primary lenders and also the remaining banks appetite (or sometimes lack of it) to fund anything that they deem to be “risky”.

“Risky” has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years and as we’ve talked about before you could have the best site in town, with an award winning design and 100% pre sales – but this in some instances still proved too risky for the banks in an uncertain market going forward.

To be fair to the banks, we are seeing increased lending activity in some sectors of the market, generally not large builds but certainly in the up to $20m market and more recently to a limited extent in the $20m to $100m sector with some isolated builds over $100m, so some of the banks, at least seem to have a developing appetite for deals.

A significant issue raised by a number of banks, is the quantum and quality of equity being put forward by developers with lenders wanting to see “real dollars” as a means of mitigating their risk further. Continue reading