Property Management

A commercial property manager looks after the day-to-day running of your property so the asset keeps performing. In practice that means collecting the rent and following it up when it is late, administering the lease and tracking its key dates, dealing with the tenant, arranging inspections and repairs, managing outgoings, and reporting back to you. Commercial management is different work to residential - the leases run longer, the outgoings are more involved, and a date missed in a lease can be expensive to put right.

We manage commercial and industrial property: industrial units and warehouses, offices, retail shops, showrooms and mixed-use buildings. We do not manage residential property - commercial, industrial, retail and office is all we do, which is why the advice you get is specific rather than general. If you are not sure whether your property fits, call us and we will tell you either way.

Yes, and changing agencies is a normal part of owning commercial property. You give your current agent the notice your management agreement requires, we prepare a new agreement with you, and the outgoing agent hands over the lease, the tenant details and the ledger. We will walk you through what is involved before anything is signed.

A rent review happens on the date and by the method written into the lease, not whenever the landlord decides. Commercial leases commonly set reviews at a fixed percentage, at CPI, or to market, and some use different methods at different points in the term. We track those dates, prepare the review, give the tenant the notice the lease requires, and handle the conversation that follows.

Option and expiry dates are tracked from the day we take the property on, because both usually have to be exercised or notified inside a window the lease sets. When one is coming up we talk to you first about what you want - renew, renegotiate, or bring the space back to the market - and deal with the tenant on that basis. Leaving it late narrows your options, which is why those dates live in the file rather than in someone’s head.

We do, as part of the management. Outgoings are the running costs of the property - council and water rates, insurance, strata levies where there are any, and the cost of keeping the building maintained - and in most commercial leases the tenant pays some or all of them on top of the base rent. Which ones can be recovered, and how much, depends on what the lease says and what kind of lease it is. Outgoings are one of the most common sources of confusion, and dispute, in commercial leasing, so we would rather set the recovery up correctly at the start than argue about it at the end of the year.

Maintenance requests come to us rather than to you. We arrange the work with contractors we have used before, and who pays for it is decided by the lease - some repairs sit with the landlord, some with the tenant. For anything beyond routine work we come to you before it goes ahead.

Inspections are scheduled as part of the management rather than left until something goes wrong, and how often depends on the property and on what the lease and your management agreement set out. A single-tenant warehouse on a long lease does not need looking at as often as a multi-tenanted building with common areas and shared plant. You get the report either way.

You get a statement covering the rent received, the costs paid and what has been disbursed to you, along with the inspection reports. If you want more detail in it, or less, tell us and we will set it up that way. Anything that affects your income or the lease we raise with you at the time rather than holding it for a statement.

We manage across the Central Coast, from the Peninsula through to Lake Macquarie. Our office is in West Gosford and we work most often through the region’s commercial and industrial precincts, including West Gosford, Somersby, Tuggerah, Wyong, Erina and Woy Woy.