Q: How long have you been in the real estate industry and how did you come to join Colliers?
I have been in the industry for 21 years now, always working within commercial real estate based in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast.
I was approached by Colliers three and a half years ago and was offered the role as Director in Charge for Colliers’ Gold Coast business. This was an opportunity that I did not want to miss out on, and I have really enjoyed my time here ever since.
Q: How do you think you use your expertise to add value to clients?
The fact that I was born and bred on the Gold Coast and have been in the commercial real estate industry for an excess of 20 years now.
I believe the value that I add to clients is my understanding of key fundamentals that make a commercial property work in this area as well as a strong expertise in every asset class here on the Gold Coast.
Q: What is the most fulfilling thing about your role?
The most fulfilling part of my role is seeing members of our team grow and helping them achieve goals beyond there prior expectations. There is nothing better than when you have achieved an outstanding result for a client and that you have exceeded their expectations.
Q: Can you think of a transaction or project that you’re particularly proud of? What did you do to ensure its success?
The transaction that stands out for me would have to be Kortum Drive, which sold in 2021. It was a co-appointed listing with Pat Cavanagh previously from our industrial team.
The owner was in his early 90’s who had a major issue with the fact that his asset was leased to Fantastic Furniture ands it was giving him a bit of grief, whereby the tenant was looking to downsize their footprint within the building which was causing him stress and additional to this he had received notification regarding cladding issues with the building and a significant amount of works were on the short-term horizon.
We worked with the owner to create a strategy that would help him realise the maximum possible price without having to take on the burden of short-term capital expenditure and the renegotiation of existing leases.
We were able to convince him to put forward a public auction campaign, whereby we provided collateral to all the purchasers advising them of the cladding issues as well as providing solutions as far as potential tenants who could take the space and leasing projections for if in the event it was fully completed.
We further provided building quotes and estimates as to the construction and reconfiguration costs to the building which made life a lot easier for the buyers to get a grip on what yields they could long term achieve and the costs that would be in place to get to that point.
Ultimately, we went to auction and had multiple bidders resulting in a price of in excess of $9,000,000. This was well in excess of the owners expectations.
Q: What do you think the opportunity is for your client’s real estate strategies in the current environment?
Depending on what asset class it is, the current Gold Coast environment right now we are hovering around the 10% vacancy rate which is one of the best in the country with incentives of less than 20% and the opportunity we see is for these current clients to invest CAPEX in these older buildings to a minimum B grade standard capitalised on todays market.
