Delivering more with less — aligning your property portfolio with your business strategy, through dedicated multi-disciplinary teams led by a single Account Manager.
Four quick questions on size, location, cost and flexibility — then we'll send your portfolio brief to our Corporate Solutions team on WhatsApp.
Our Corporate Solutions team works with clients to align the property portfolio with their business strategy. Put simply, our objective is to ensure a client's property portfolio is of the right size, in the right location, at the right cost, and has the right degree of flexibility to enable the business to function efficiently and meet its objectives.
Neither carrying space you no longer need, nor constraining the business by running too tight.
Where your people, customers and supply chain actually are — tested with country location planning.
Occupancy cost benchmarked against the market, with reduction and value enhancement built in.
Lease events that give you options when the business changes, rather than locking you in.
Every business has different issues and objectives — we tailor our services to suit, delivering solutions through dedicated multi-disciplinary teams led by an Account Manager who co-ordinates the individual specialisms required, ensuring optimum results.
Portfolio review and analysis against the business plan.
Explore →Where to be, and why — modelled rather than assumed.
Explore →Systems and benchmarks so the portfolio can actually be managed.
Explore →Managed exit from space the business no longer needs.
Explore →Critical lease event management — never miss a break again.
Explore →Property due diligence and integration through a transaction.
Explore →Running the deals across the estate to one standard.
Explore →Statutory and regulatory obligations tracked across the estate.
Explore →Where handing over the function beats staffing it internally.
Explore →Delivering more with less — the point of the exercise.
Explore →Estates get expensive quietly. Not through one bad deal, but through a dozen small omissions that only become visible when they are no longer fixable.
A break option passes unexercised because nobody owned the date. A rent review is settled on the landlord’s evidence because there was no time to assemble any. A site sits half-used for four years because the lease has three years left and nobody modelled the cost of leaving early against the cost of staying. Each of those is survivable. Together they are usually a larger number than any rent you negotiated.
Corporate solutions work is the opposite discipline to doing deals. It is building a single factual picture of the estate, putting every date in a calendar with an owner and a lead time, and then making property decisions in the order the calendar dictates rather than the order the post arrives.
One row per lease, and the same columns for every site, however small. The discipline is in the completeness rather than the sophistication — a spreadsheet everyone trusts beats a system nobody updates.
| Field | Why it is on the row |
|---|---|
| Term dates and expiry | The anchor for everything else. Also the field most often wrong, because leases get varied, reversionary leases get granted, and the varied date never reaches the schedule. |
| Break dates and their conditions | A break is only worth what its conditions allow. Vacant possession, no subsisting breach and all sums paid are each capable of making a break unexercisable, so the conditions sit on the row next to the date. |
| Notice periods and the latest safe date | Not the break date — the date by which the decision has to be made, counted back through notice, board approval and the time needed to find somewhere else. |
| Rent review basis and date | Upward-only open market, index-linked or fixed uplift. Each needs a different amount of preparation and a different lead time. |
| Security of tenure | Whether the lease is contracted out of the 1954 Act. This changes your position at expiry completely and is frequently unrecorded. |
| Total occupancy cost | Rent, rates, service charge, insurance, utilities, fit-out amortised and a dilapidations provision. Rent alone is usually between half and two-thirds of the real number, which is why rent-only comparisons mislead. |
| Repairing obligation and condition | Full repairing on an ageing building is an open-ended liability. Whether a schedule of condition was annexed at the start decides how open-ended. |
| EPC rating | Letting commercial property below EPC E has been unlawful in England and Wales since April 2023, subject to exemptions. If you may sublet or assign, the rating is a commercial constraint and not just a certificate. |
If you cannot produce this for every site today, that is the first piece of work, and it is usually a few weeks rather than a project.
Most estate reviews arrive with an instruction to reduce footprint. Sometimes that is right. Often the honest answer is that the footprint is roughly correct and badly distributed, and that the saving is in replacing three compromised sites with two good ones rather than in cutting space.
Two second-order effects are worth stating before anyone commits. First, a smaller estate taken on shorter terms costs more per square foot and gives up the rent-free periods that come with term commitment, so headline savings can be partly bought back in flexibility pricing. Second, consolidation moves people’s commutes, and a consolidation that looks efficient on a plan can cost more in attrition than it saves in rent. Neither is a reason not to do it. Both are reasons to put a number on it first.
Where we think an instruction is wrong, we say so with the arithmetic attached. You are paying for a view, not for agreement.
However incomplete. A schedule with gaps tells us where to look; starting from nothing costs you a fortnight.
Rent, rates, service charge and insurance by site. This is what lets us tell you which sites are genuinely out of line.
Headcount by location over three years, and which sites are strategically fixed. Property follows the operating model, not the reverse.
Usually there is one event forcing the timetable. We will work that first and build the picture around it rather than making you wait.
In practice from about three leases upwards, because that is the point at which events start overlapping and no single person holds all the dates. Below that, lease-by-lease advice is usually better value than a portfolio exercise.
Only if the database is right. The common failure is not absence of a system but absence of reconciliation: variations, reversionary leases and deeds of surrender that never reached the record. We check the schedule against the documents, and in most reviews we find at least one date that was wrong in a way that mattered.
Twelve to eighteen months before the notice deadline, not before the break date. The decision needs a real alternative to be credible, and finding, agreeing and fitting out an alternative takes most of that window. A break considered three months out is not a decision, it is an acceptance.
Either, agreed in writing before work starts. A calendar and an annual review suit a retainer; a specific acquisition, disposal or review is better by instruction. What we will not do is take a fee from a landlord on a transaction where we are advising you, because you cannot buy independent advice from someone the other side is paying.
Yes, and we do. Our own live evidence base is deepest in London and the South East, so for other regions we will tell you where our data is thin and what we are relying on instead rather than presenting a small sample as a market view.
Fill in your details and one of our team will contact you to find out what you are looking for — completely free.