CASE STUDY
How a Perth Specialist Bought Their Own Premises Off Market
A specialist had been searching for their own premises for over two years without success. The market wasn’t the problem. The search was looking for a finished building instead of a viable one.
DEAL SNAPSHOT
The numbers.
ASSET CLASS
Medical
CLIENT
Specialist doctor acquiring their principal place of business
LOCATION
Inner western suburbs, metropolitan Perth, WA
PRICE
Circa $3m
YIELD
OWNER OCCUPIER
LEASE
Off market, with planning approval and specialist fit-out coordinated inside due diligence
CASE NOTES
The full story.
The Brief
The client had been looking for over two years. Personally, in whatever time a practising specialist has left over, which is not much. They wanted to stop paying rent and own the premises the practice operated from.
Two years of searching had produced inspections, near-misses and a growing suspicion that the right building did not exist in the suburbs they needed to be in.
What Was Actually Going Wrong
The building did exist. The search method could not find it.
Two structural problems. The first is that owner-occupier medical stock in established inner suburbs rarely reaches a listing platform. It changes hands between parties who already know each other, or it never becomes available at all because nobody thinks to ask the owner. A search conducted through listings is a search of the residual market.
The second is more subtle, and it is the one that had cost two years. The client was searching for a medical facility. What suited them was a building that could become one. Filter for finished product and you eliminate almost every property that would work, because the conversion has not happened yet and the current owner has no reason to do it.
How We Approached It
We reset the brief around the practice rather than the property: clinical requirements, room count, patient flow, parking, accessibility, proximity to referrers, and the planning framework each candidate suburb sat under.
The search then ran off market, directly to owners of suitable buildings whether or not they were selling.
The critical work came after we found the site. A building that needs a planning approval and a specialist fit-out is only a good acquisition if you know, before you go unconditional, that the approval is achievable and what the fit-out will cost. Unresolved, those are two open-ended risks sitting behind an exchanged contract. So we coordinated both inside the due diligence period — planning pathway confirmed, fit-out scoped and costed — and the client made the decision to proceed knowing the total number rather than the purchase price.
The Outcome
A suitable facility acquired off market at circa $3m, with the planning approval and specialist fit-out resolved before settlement. The practice owns its premises. Rent has become equity.
THE VANTA LENS
How we read it.
Two years of reviewing listings will not surface an asset that is never listed. But the deeper failure here was definitional: the client was searching for a completed medical facility when what they needed was a building capable of becoming one. That distinction is the difference between a market with almost no stock and a market with plenty. The conversion risk is real, which is why it belongs inside due diligence rather than after settlement — approval pathway confirmed, fit-out costed, decision made on the full number. Most owner-occupier searches fail because the buyer is looking for a finished product instead of a solvable one.