For Gray Johnson’s Simon Regan, the secret to a healthy pipeline isn’t found in a database of cold leads or a clever marketing campaign. It’s in the phone calls that come from people he’s known for years sometimes decades. By his own estimate, roughly 90 per cent of his business now comes from people he has dealt with at some point across his career.
“It’s nice that they know you’re still around and still looking after them,” Regan says. “That’s where I get most of my work, actually.”
Two recent sales, on opposite sides of Melbourne and in very different corners of the commercial market, show exactly how that works and why, for Regan, a deal is rarely just about the property.
The first was a warehouse-industrial property at 4/3 Woodbine Court, Wantirna which is one of seven properties in a development, each with its own street frontage, tucked just off Lewis Road near Burwood Highway. Built of brick rather than the more common concrete panel, it carries a 20-metre street frontage.
The property had been held by the same family since it was built in the 1970s more than 50 years as an investment. For roughly 30 of those years, it had a single long-standing tenant. When that tenant became unwell and vacated, the family found itself holding a property that time had caught up with tired bathrooms, a worn kitchen and an office space Regan describes as dated.
Rather than reinvest, the family decided it was time to sell. “They’d had it long enough,” Regan says. It’s a pattern he sees often in commercial property with long, stable tenancies that quietly extend an owner’s investment horizon, until something forces a decision. “Generational change, cashing out, sometimes an investment horizon just arrives, and you sell off and go somewhere else.”
The worn condition didn’t put buyers off so much as reframe the sale. Regan marketed it as a blank canvas, an opportunity to fit the space out to suit a new occupier’s own operation, rather than inherit someone else’s. That approach paid off as the property went to expressions of interest and attracted four offers, eventually selling for $833,000 to an owner-occupier, a local family business specialising in high-end concrete finishes, the kind used in bespoke kitchen benchtops and bathrooms, who will now operate close to home.
And how did that family come to Gray Johnson in the first place? Through Regan himself as they are long-standing clients who called him when it was finally time to sell.
The second sale sits in a very different category: 147 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, a retail property in a strip that, while not considered prime retail, continues to draw steady interest. “You can’t really go past Port Melbourne,” Regan says. “Someone’s always interested in Bay Street.”
This campaign, too, ran as an expression of interest process, drawing around 36 direct enquiries selling in the week after the EOI period closed. Two parties ultimately submitted offers, and Regan negotiated an outcome that met the vendor’s expectations, a sale price of $900,000.
On the surface, it’s a comparatively modest headline figure for Port Melbourne retail. But the number that matters more is the yield: a net return in the low four per cent range an aggressive result driven not by an inflated price, but by rental levels that had room to grow. “There’s more behind the numbers than meets the eye,” Regan notes, pointing to an echo of what’s playing out in residential property, where rents have been climbing hard.
As with Woodbine Court, it was another existing client, someone who came directly to Regan to handle the transaction.
Beyond the two sales, Regan describes a market that has been unremarkable of late quiet through the school holiday period and yet to properly pick up, even with term back underway. It’s a read shared by other agents he’s spoken to, rather than something isolated to his own patch.
