90% of the problems I see are caused by the same thing

Whether it’s a $30 million development or a $30,000 refurbishment, changes to stakeholders, market conditions, and economic outlook are just some of the factors that can affect your project.

So, if change is inevitable, how do you make sure your project works?  You start off with a crystal clear project objective, and then check every decision throughout the project against that objective.

It’s sounds simple in theory, but what about putting it into practice? And what happens if you don’t?

The project objective for a retail precinct should always be trading tenants - that’s how you get paid rent and deliver the return on the asset.  So when making decisions about your project, you need to think about how those decisions will affect your tenants. 

Below are some examples of problems I’ve come across over the last few years:

• Insufficient power in a building.
• Not enough toilets in a building to allow for liquor licensing.
• No easy access to storage for tenants.
• No delivery access or rubbish access for retail tenants in a commercial building.
• No clear pathway for tenants to install air-conditioning pipework.
• No communications infrastructure for retail tenants on the bottom of a commercial building.  And many, many more.

There are usually good reasons these things come up – needing to save money on the build is a common one, and it’s completely valid.  But you need to think the solution all the way through to the end. In order to reach your project objective of trading tenants, they need to be able to complete their fitout and get certified. You need to make sure your building allows them to do that.  Otherwise the risk is that they will come back to ask for more incentive during the fitout.  Or worse, discover the problem ahead of time and not sign the lease at all!

For example - air-conditioning pathways.  It's all very well to delete the air-conditioning from a tenancy and leave it for the tenant to install - it makes sense in a lot of ways.  But depending on the building it might not be quite that simple.  If your building is several stories and there is no chilled water, where are your tenants going to put their external plant?   And how will they get fresh air intake?  If you don't create some pathways for them to use, then they will need to take apart your building to make it work.

Or communications.  When retail goes into the ground floor of a development it's very easy to overlook tenants' requirements as the focus is on what takes up most of the floor space.   I've worked on a commercial building where one of the tenants in the office above was a major national corporation.  They had very specific communications requirements, and worked with the developer to  install a private NBN solution that would service the whole office building.  Expect for the retail.  The retailers ended up having to use expensive mobile data services because they couldn't get either broadband or NBN because the building didn't exist on any of the usual portals. 

These things can all be solved – throw enough money at a problem and you can make it go away. But wouldn’t it be better to avoid those problems altogether?

Ask the question: how will this impact the end users of the building - my tenants?  How can I save money and still make it possible for them to create an exciting offer that will bring people to my building and let them operate a thriving business that will mean they can pay their rent?