Leasing

Overview

Landlords and tenants with institutional property footprints run leasing portfolios where the volume, the variation and the commercial stakes all have to be held together across every assignment. A single lease is a contract. A portfolio of leases across office towers, shopping centres, industrial estates and retail shopfronts is something else. Balance is required of throughput against risk, standardisation against site-by-site negotiation, internal decision-making against landlord or tenant counterparties, and transactional speed against the escalation judgement that complex or contested assignments require.

This is a category of work where conventional legal delivery becomes inefficient: recurring portfolios of new leases, renewals, variations, assignments, subleases and surrenders; jurisdiction-specific retail leasing legislation; compressed timelines driven by property teams, operations teams and counterparties; defined KPIs on turnaround, accuracy and registration; and constant pressure to run the portfolio consistently and visibly across every asset.

Faculti Lawyers delivers portfolio-based leasing services with the discipline to execute volume efficiently and the diligence to escalate, negotiate and resolve the assignments that require it.

What we do

Our Leasing team acts for landlords and tenants across office, retail and industrial portfolios nationally. Landlord clients include owners of CBD office towers, shopping centre landlords, industrial estate owners and institutional property funds. Tenant clients include retail chains, banks and financial institutions, telcos, government agencies, hospitality groups and enterprise occupiers. We work equally well as the portfolio counsel for either side of the leasing table, and our practice is sector-agnostic: office, retail and industrial all run through the same team, the same technology, and the same governance framework. It is a large national team with substantial depth of senior lawyers. Each area is run by practitioners with direct experience of the jurisdiction, the asset class and the client's operating structure.

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New leases anchor the portfolio. They set the commercial terms, the risk allocation and the precedent positions that every subsequent variation, renewal or assignment will run against. We draft, review and negotiate new leases and agreements for lease for landlords and tenants across office, retail and industrial assets in all Australian jurisdictions, including site-specific negotiations, precedent-based portfolio rollouts, and integrated fitout and incentive arrangements. Senior lawyers lead the commercially significant and contested assignments directly.

Renewals and option exercises are where portfolio discipline is most visible. Missed options cost tenants occupancy. Missed market reviews cost landlords rent. We manage renewals, extensions and option exercises at portfolio scale for clients across every asset class, including option notices, market review processes, holdover arrangements and renegotiated renewal terms. Workflow controls and reporting run across the portfolio to ensure critical dates are tracked and acted on, not missed.

Variations, assignments and subleases make up the steady operational rhythm of a leasing portfolio. They arrive in volume, they move on compressed timelines, and they need to be executed consistently against the governing lease and any agreed playbook positions. We prepare, review and negotiate lease variations, assignments, sub-leases and combinations of assignment, extension and variation, for landlords and tenants across office, retail and industrial portfolios. The work is run to fixed turnaround times with senior supervision on every assignment.

Leasing portfolios generate a constant stream of ancillary documentation that has to keep pace with the primary lease work rather than lagging behind it. We prepare and execute signage agreements, storage licences, car park licences, access licences, naming rights agreements, and the other ancillary documents that attach to commercial, retail and industrial leases. These are run from client-approved templates at fixed fees, with the same process discipline and registration workflow applied to the primary lease portfolio.

Lease exits are rarely straightforward. They involve make-good obligations, outstanding rent, bank guarantees and bond recovery, assignment and assumption of residual liabilities, and sometimes contested terminations by either side. We manage surrenders, terminations and lease exits for landlords and tenants, including deed of surrender documentation, make-good negotiations, bank guarantee release, and the registration and administration that closes out the assignment cleanly. Senior lawyers lead contested or high-value exits directly.

Some leasing assignments turn into substantial negotiations or disputes: unusual commercial positions, landlord or tenant counterparties taking hard lines, significant variations to standard terms, breaches, rent disputes, make-good disagreements, and contested terminations. These assignments need advocacy and forensic capability that sit beyond routine lease negotiation. We run them with the same senior lawyers who lead the firm's complex dispute work, combining leasing expertise with the litigation strength that contested and high-value assignments demand.

Institutional leasing clients need more than document-by-document execution. They need legal counsel that sits at the strategic layer of the portfolio: building and maintaining the precedent positions, designing the playbooks that govern decision-making, structuring the approach to new acquisitions or disposals, and advising on regulatory and legislative change as it affects the portfolio. We work with landlord and tenant clients on portfolio-level advisory, playbook design, precedent maintenance and strategic structuring, with senior lawyers leading the engagement directly.

Telecommunications infrastructure on buildings and land is a highly regulated asset class that sits at the intersection of leasing, carrier licensing under Schedule 3 of the Telecommunications Act, building owner or strata consent, access rights and site-specific operational requirements. We act for telecommunications providers on rooftop antenna, monopole and tower licensing arrangements with building owners, body corporates and landowners, and for building owners on the negotiation, variation and renewal of carrier access arrangements. The work combines specialist regulatory knowledge with the portfolio discipline of our broader leasing practice.

How we deliver

The Faculti Lawyers leasing model is not a cookie-cutter solution with one partner at the top of every assignment. It is a large national team with substantial depth of senior lawyers. Volume work runs through structured workflows supervised by senior practitioners. When an assignment requires escalation (because it is commercially significant, contested, unusually complex, or carries precedent risk) a senior lawyer takes carriage of it directly. The escalation is engineered into the model, not negotiated around it.

We operate across the range of client-interface models that institutional leasing clients use. For some clients, we take instructions directly from the internal property team. For others, we work through external property managers and agents, including major national and international property management providers. For others again, we interface with both the property team and the in-house legal team, with agreed protocols for where instructions originate, how approvals are obtained and where escalation lands. The model flexes to the client's operating structure, not the other way around.

Playbooks are built with each client, setting agreed positions, fall-back positions and delegation levels for the decisions that should move without approval and the ones that should not. Playbook maintenance runs as standing work, with legislative changes, new precedent positions and client-instructed updates reflected promptly.

FAI, our technology platform, accelerates the work around it - intake, triage, document processing, portfolio reporting and precedent management - so the judgement calls happen where they matter, at speed, with every step accounted for. Portfolio management disciplines run alongside: defined KPIs on turnaround, accuracy, registration and response times; monthly reporting against each material KPI; workflow controls; quality assurance; and regular performance review.

The result is delivery confidence across the full portfolio. Efficient throughput on the assignments that should move. Senior attention, escalation and forensic rigour on the ones that should not. Every step accounted for.

Track record

Built on decades of national leasing practice. Engineered for institutional scale.

Faculti Lawyers grew out of Thomsons, one of Australia's top-tier corporate firms, and brings that institutional pedigree into a delivery model purpose-built for high-volume leasing portfolios. The practice has long-standing recognition in leasing law across Australia.

Our Leasing team acts for landlord and tenant clients across every major asset class, including CBD office towers, shopping centres, industrial estates, national retail networks, hospitality portfolios, telecommunications infrastructure and enterprise occupier footprints. Recent and current engagements include the management of national leasing portfolios for major retail occupiers, government agencies, telecommunications providers and institutional landlords across every Australian jurisdiction.

Our close working relationship with Thomsons gives the team direct access to specialist expertise when an assignment calls for it. Whether the point at issue is tax, property, regulatory, employment, public law or a point of commercial or corporate law beyond the leasing practice, the specialist depth of a top-tier corporate firm sits directly alongside the team.

Overview

What we do

New leases and agreements for lease

Renewals, extensions and options

Variations, assignments and subleases

Incentive deeds, side deeds and fitout arrangements

Ancillary documentation

Surrenders, terminations and lease exits

Contested negotiations and lease disputes

Portfolio-level advisory, playbooks and structuring

Telecommunications rooftop, pole and tower licensing

How we deliver

Track record