Rebalancing the landlord’s advantage.
Independent strategy and advisory for tenants.
About
Our clients pay us to think, not to process.
With over 30 years of experience across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Africa, our clients achieve strategic objectives by making smart decisions about real estate.
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We focus on a key risk or opportunity for our clients. Lease costs can amount to 15-20% of revenue and involve long-term commitments impacting engagement, productivity, and collaboration.
Our strategic advice prepares our clients for economic shifts, mergers, new technologies and market competition.
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Selecting the correct strategy results in leverage, essential to successful outcomes for our clients. Our approach combines extensive experience, deep industry connections and always remaining completely unconflicted. The success of each transaction is built on understanding the client, comprehensive planning, detailed market research and analysis, controlled dissemination of information and transparent communication with our clients.
Services
Valuable, unbiased and unconflicted advice.
We specialise in advisory and strategy. We are not leasing agents – and we do not offer project management, workplace strategy or design.
Why? Because we work for a range of clients – from very small to very large – across many different industries. Because each client has different needs, we we collaborate with the industry’s top consultants on a project-by-project basis. This ensures that our advice is tailored to each client’s specific requirements and remains free from conflict or bias. We believe that multidisciplinary approaches often yield average results.
Read on to find out more about the typical roles we fill for our clients.
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We offer full service tenant representation including needs analysis, property search (on and off market), financial and non-financial comparative analysis, negotiating commercial terms and assisting legal counsel with the preparation of documentation.
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Working with the best industry specialists, we help our clients to use their workplace to enable them to achieve their organisational goals. An effective strategy is developed around an organisation’s unique strategic objectives enhancing culture, efficiency and optimising performance.
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We have a sophisticated suite of tools to compare options quickly and accurately. Our experience has shown that we can achieve material leverage during negotiations through fast and accurate analysis.
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Whether a lease ends in 5 years or less than 12 months, our strategic plans help our clients be prepared for merger, acquisition, rapid expansion/contraction, new technology, new competitors or other disruptors.
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We offer our clients regular “mark to market analysis” to benchmark existing commercial tenancy commitments and forecasting future movements (market rent, outgoings annual increases and incentives) in the context of the current market.
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A valuable profit centre for many landlords, we can provide expert tenant advice and negotiate lease exit obligations, including makegood and redecoration.
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We can show how an existing building compares with other available options in the market. We help our clients define real value by developing strategic portfolio reviews including financial benchmarking. We review, benchmark and advise our clients about their property portfolio’s footprint relative to their competitors and review and reconcile outgoings to check for anomalies or excessive charging.
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Reporting on current status, trends and future directions helps our clients navigate risks, capitalise on opportunities and understand how the real estate markets can affect their organisations.
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We deliver scalability and agility through our core team and leverage our extensive partner network to deliver sophisticated outcomes for our clients -project management, design, cost control, change management, town planning and relocation.
Sectors + clients
Sectors we service:
Case studies
We’ve been involved in some of the largest leasing transactions in Australia. But don’t just take our word for it. See how we’ve rebalanced the scales for some of our clients.
Meet emil
Emil is a commercially focused business leader and strategy specialist.
For more than three decades, including senior leadership roles at Charter Hall, CBRE and founding Counsel, Emil has accumulated deep occupier advisory, strategic project leasing, development and brokerage experience across all primary Australian markets.
Emil’s approach at Counsel is significantly enhanced by the 16 years he spent at Charter Hall, mostly as National Head of Leasing, where he worked closely with the Group’s Fund and Asset Management Teams.
A clear understanding of the landlord’s perspective on leasing transactions, particularly deal structuring and the provisioning in the typical asset management model, adds significant value.
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At Charter Hall, as Group Head of Leasing, Emil’s team managed large and complex transactions on behalf of various Group managed funds across various geographic markets, each with their own dynamics. Standard processes result in missed opportunities - approach everything with first principles and make no assumptions.
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At CBRE as Pacific Head of Occupier Advisory & Transaction Services, Emil redefined the business’ purpose, operating model and strategy, transforming the leadership team and redefining role descriptions and responsibilities.
The new innovative industrial team quickly became the market leader while an energised new leadership team with clarified mandates saw valuable new business development.
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Emil founded Counsel to address two key issues. The first is the obvious conflict of interest many well-known firms experience by simultaneously working for both building owners and tenants. The second is the opaque position taken by many advisers in relation to the quantum and source of their fees (including receiving trailing fees for recommending consultants or other service providers to their clients).
Independence and zero conflicts of interest were cast into the foundation of Counsel.