Perth’s property agencies are shaking up their operations to position themselves for growth.
Roly Egerton-Warburton’s career started in the wine trade.
In 2004, the newly appointed Cushman & Wakefield WA managing director took up a sales role with Forrest Hill Wines in Western Australia’s Great Southern, an area with great historical significance for his family and for the state.
The Egerton-Warburtons migrated from England in the 1800s and established an estate near Mount Barker.
“I spent the first third of my career in wine. I was a viticultural winemaker trainee then moved into business development and into the agricultural business more generally,” Mr Egerton-Warburton told Business News.
Most of Mr Egerton-Warburton’s time in the wine industry was spent working with the Heytesbury Group, specifically Vasse Felix, where he was sales and marketing manager.
“[I had] the benefit of a lot of corporate experience through being an employee and having a seat at the table at Heytesbury for a long time,” he said.
“[I’d] sit next to Paul Holmes à Court. I learned a lot from him over a seven-year period.”
Mr Egerton-Warburton headed overseas to study wine: to London, California and working two vintages in France. However, his career then took a sharp turn.
He was drawn to the property industry in 2014 and was recruited as Sheffield Property’s first staff member.
Sheffield’s founders, Mark Clapham and Digby Sutherland, explained that despite Mr Egerton-Warburton’s lack of property experience at the time, he aligned with what they were looking for.
“We could see what his background was, which is similar to what we do,” Mr Sutherland told Business News.
“We just wanted someone who had all those attributes that we could teach what we do.”
Eight years on, in 2022, global real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield acquired Sheffield Property.
The move brought the number of Cushman & Wakefield’s Australian offices to 11 and resulted in Mr Clapham and Mr Sutherland becoming joint managing directors of the state’s operations.
At the time, Mr Egerton-Warburton stepped up as head of office leasing in WA for Cushman & Wakefield.
Last month, Cushman & Wakefield’s WA division revealed a restructure, elevating Mr Egerton-Warburton to managing director for WA and establishing a new major projects office.
Messers Sutherland and Clapham, who have worked together for 22 years, will head up the newly formed division.
Speaking to Business News about the move, Mr Clapham said the establishment of a major projects office was partly about him and Mr Sutherland going back to their roots.
“When we built Sheffield, it evolved out of working on projects and pre-commitment leasing,” he said.
“That was something we wanted to do, to get back to what we had initially set out to do.”
Mr Clapham and Mr Sutherland brokered pre-commitment leasing deals for 10 of the 14 office towers built in Perth and surrounds during the past 15 years.
These included Brookfield’s Tower 2, the Shell headquarters at Perth City Link, Department of Communities’ relocation, and the Department of Finance’s Herdsman offices.
Currently, the pair are working on filling space at QV1 and at Shell’s Kings Square premises, and securing tenancies for the impending vacancy Inpex will leave at Enex.
They acknowledge the difficulties associated with getting new office buildings out of the ground in Perth at the moment, which is part of the reason Cushman & Wakefield’s major projects business has a national focus.
Cygnet West brokered the $75 million sale of 66 St Georges Terrace late last year. Photo: Cygnet West
According to the Property Council of Australia, Perth has the lowest pipeline of new office supply of all capitals.
And doubt has been cast over the largest office project in Perth’s short-term pipeline: Victor Goh’s 54-storey Elizabeth Quay development.
Industry sources say while Mr Goh could still build the tower, the fact that Rio Tinto was not secured as a tenant means the 60,000 square metre office component may not be included.
Mr Egerton-Warburton said the impending supply shortage would be a good thing for landlords.
“Construction costs are so high at the moment [that] the economic rent needs to be really high to justify a new building,” he said.
“There’ll be a point in time in the next three years when the vacancy in prime grade [buildings] are going to be quite low and there’s nothing under construction, so it’s quite a good dynamic for the Perth market.”
As Perth’s office vacancy rate reduces, confidence is expected to grow among building owners, which should translate to an increased likelihood of new developments going ahead.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Perth team currently consists of 93 people, up from 25 at the time of the 2022 takeover.
Landscape
Cushman & Wakefield’s repositioning follows moves by other Perth real estate companies to shake up their operations.
Cygnet West came into existence following the expiration of Colliers International WA’s franchise agreement with Colliers at the end of 2021.
As the agreement was coming to an end, Colliers’ then WA outfit decided to branch out into a separate entity known as Cygnet West.
The move resulted in two distinct businesses forming in Perth: a newly badged Colliers and Cygnet West.
The latter entity has built a strong presence in the CBD, brokering the $75 million divestment of 66 St Georges Terrace, which was the city’s largest office transaction in 2024.
Cygnet West staff has grown from 129 at the start of 2022 to 146 today.
Speaking to Business News about the decision to break away from a global brand, Cygnet West chief executive Imran Mohiuddin likened the move to a “civilised divorce”.
“I know I’m using out-of-date analogies, but we were feeling like the wife looking after the fifty kids, doing the washing and ironing, while the man was in the pub, buying the drinks,” Mr Mohiuddin told Business News.
“When we decided we wanted to stand on our own two feet, the kids voted to stay with mum.”
Mr Mohiuddin added that the company’s rent roll had grown by 40 per cent since the franchise agreement ended, largely driven by work to manage Centuria Capital Group’s retail assets.
“That was a large portfolio, essentially the Primewest portfolio; at one stage that was going to be a national tender and we weren’t even going to be part of it,” he said.
“When they looked at it carefully, we were approached and asked if we would put in a … bid for WA only, which we were more than happy to do, and that was our first big endorsement from the market.”
Mr Mohiuddin said the attitude of many global real estate firms during Covid – to focus on the east coast, to the detriment of WA – worked to Cygnet West’s advantage.
“The speculation in the market was that when we stopped being a global brand, that we would not be in touch with global players,” he said.
“That’s proven to be incorrect.
“When Covid happened … as we were locked up here in WA, the larger companies couldn’t get people to service the properties here because all their senior people were there (on the east coast).
“Some of our competitors were ringing us and pleading us to show some clients a property when they [had] a WA buyer.
“That just shows you that the market then realised the importance of having agents locally, and this Sydney and Melbourne mentality of ‘it [Perth] is an outpost and we can manage it from here’ doesn’t quite happen.”
Mr Mohiuddin said the market dipped following Covid, highlighted by the limited volume of office transactions in Perth.
This was despite at least $400 million of offices in the CBD coming on the market in 2023 and 2024.
“We got a lot of listings [after Covid],” he said.
“There were a lot of off-market properties we ran with big institutional clients, high-value properties.
“But in that time post-Covid and the office market uncertainty with interest rates, etc, sales volumes were down, [so] they didn’t happen.”
Cygnet West’s Wayne Lawrence and Tory Packer brokered the sale of 66 St Georges Terrace for $75 million to Oceania Capital Group, acting for the vendor RF Corval.
Mr Mohiuddin said this proved that the agency was front of mind for investors.
And he’s confident about what the next 12 months will bring for the Perth property market.
“I believe the agents now are pretty busy and have had enormous success this year,” Mr Mohiuddin said.
“All the hard work they’ve done has turned into [the fact that] we are going to have our best year in ten this year.”
Shifting focus
CBD agency Burgess Rawson had a change in ownership in late 2022, when Chris Wiese and Andrew Graham acquired a 75 per cent stake in the business.
The pair had been directors at then Yolk Property Group subsidiary, Rental Management Australia.
Jonathon Fyson (left), Anna Garvey, Craig Carrol, Chris Wiese, Alison Haigh, Glen Bougourd and David Sierakowski. Photo: Michael O’Brien
Now managing director at Burgess Rawson’s WA operation, Mr Wiese has led substantial revenue growth at the company as well as boosting staff numbers.
During the past 12 months, the company has grown its headcount by about 15 per cent, to 73 staff.
Its new team members include Jonathon Fyson as head of valuations and Craig Carrol as director of valuations.
The refresh of Burgess Rawson’s valuations team followed the retirement of director Steve Kish in December last year.
Tim Hammond remains in the valuations team as a director following 15 more than years at the company.
Anna Garvey, who has worked at JLL as a research analyst, was appointed as senior research analyst at Burgess Rawson earlier this year.
This marks a move into the research realm for the business, which Mr Wiese explained was a way to provide more value for clients.
“Doing valuation and collecting all this information is one thing,” Mr Wiese told Business News.
“But then having research to put it all together and then provide our clients with those additional insights is really important.
“We want to be the experts in the field that we operate in.”
Alison Haigh has joined as an associate director of property management, David Sierakowski as a sales associate, and Glen Bougourd as an associate director of facilities management.
Burgess Rawson in WA is looking to turn over about $20 million this year compared with about $16 million in 2023-24.
Burgess Rawson mainly operates in the industrial, childcare, fast food and petrol stations sectors.
