What a year 2020 ended up being! Who would have thought things would have ended up how they did?
After not being allowed to leave home for months, it looked like things were starting to head in the right direction. The positive COVID numbers were going down by the day, and Uncle Dan said in his press conference that we had a target date for when things would start to ease. And thank God for that!
I casually perused the commercial real estate market again to see what potential properties were available.
There looked to be some options on the market that would suit us. One was fairly close to a shopping district, train station, etc. It would be perfect. Parking wasn't great during the week, but after hours and weekends looked good.
This one wasn't in an Industrial 1 Zone, but after a quick chat with Matt from Liquorplan, he didn't think it would be an issue.
The agent for this one was the same one I was dealing with just before COVID, and she was keen to get us a location.
I went to have a look. I'd driven past the building a hundred times over the years. It was long and narrow, but a bit bigger than we needed. It would be perfect and even had a rear yard.
It was an older factory that had likely had a million uses over the years, including a mechanic's workshop at some point. It would need a good clean and a complete paint.
I shot off an email offer to the agent.
After the previous dealings, I made the call not to go in too hard with this one. I even put together a rough drawing of a proposed fit-out to give the owner an idea of what we wanted to do.
Fairly quickly, I got a response that they weren't willing to negotiate at all. The advertised price was what they would accept.
Okay, we can live with that. It's reasonable.
I responded that we would be happy to sign a lease based on that.
A week passed and no response.
I called the agent, and she hadn't heard anything either, so she got in contact with the owner again.
Shortly after, I got a call back.
"Trent, I've spoken to the owner. They don't want to lease the factory to you, and they haven't given a reason."
Well, okay, but… I'm starting to get a little over this now…
This particular factory I'd seen for lease in April during COVID. It had been empty since then, and even at this point in January, it was still empty.
Anyway, time to move on.
Surely We've Found One This Time?
Open the app back up and bingo… a factory I looked at back before COVID is on the market again.
When I looked at it the first time, I dismissed it as it was too big. However, now they'd dropped the price on it, so I'd have another look.
I contacted the agent and arranged another inspection.
Yes, okay, this one looks good.
I had a good chat with the agent when we finished the inspection. I said to him, "Before I go putting an offer together, can you speak to the owner and tell him we're looking to set up a brewery and taproom? If he's okay with that, we can talk."
The agent called me back the following day. The owner was on board, had no issue with our intended use and asked us to put an offer forward for consideration.
So now things are going how they should (yeah, I should have learnt by now not to think like that).
Anyway, we were in late November now, so we'd be pushing to get things sorted before Christmas.
I reached out to Matt at Liquorplan again and got him to have a look at the location for me. Everything stacked up well. Matt mentioned that the process with this local council was a little different, so it might take a bit more time.
We sent an offer through to the agent, and the owner was happy with it. Following that, the agent sent me through a form to fill in (formal offer) and a copy of the draft lease document for review.
Lease document? I'd better get a solicitor to review this one.
I didn't have one at this point.
I reached out to a conveyancer we'd used a few years back for a domestic property and asked her, "Can you help with this?"
She responded that someone in her office could and she'd passed it on to them. An email followed from the person she'd passed it to, saying they would call me a few days later.
A week passed, and I was still waiting for this call back.
The agent had been back onto me. I explained I was just waiting for my solicitor's review.
"No problem," he said.
Eventually, after following up, this solicitor called me back.
He was on the phone with me, mumbling different bits and pieces. The conversation was going in all sorts of directions, but not the one I wanted.
I'm thinking to myself at this point, if this guy is charging me by the minute (like most solicitors do), then I'm not looking forward to the bill for this call.
It was almost an hour and a half.
Towards the end of the conversation, he gave me a phone number and said, "Give this guy a call. He's a solicitor who specialises in leases."
What? Wait, I thought that's what you were?
That's why I sent it to you, and you've been sitting on it for a week!
I held myself together but almost lost my shit on the phone.
This guy had just wasted an hour and a half of my time on the phone and a week of my time to review a lease that he couldn't actually do.
Following this colossal waste of time, I ended up doing it the old-fashioned way. Looked up a local solicitor who advertised as doing commercial leases, called them, had a good conversation and explained the situation.
She agreed to review it for me within 48 hours.
Done!
We Have a Deal… Or Do We?
So now we had everything checked off. Terms agreed, lease amount agreed.
I went back to the agent with the final tick and asked him to send me the final lease to sign. He went off to get things together.
We were almost at Christmas now. I was keen to get the lease signed before Christmas so we could get into the building in early January.
Kylie and I had a five-week holiday booked from mid-January, so if we didn't get it signed before Christmas, it might cause some issues.
The agent called me back two days before Christmas and advised he hadn't been able to reach the owner. Possibly they'd already taken off for their Christmas holidays.
We'd need to sort it in early January, as the agent's office was closed until then.
Okay, it's not ideal, but given everything had been agreed and it was just formalising things now, we at least had some comfort that we had a home.
We contemplated telling family and friends over Christmas about our new business venture. Up until now, we'd only told a small handful of people.
We really wanted to have a location before we told anyone, given our luck in securing a place to date.
So we held off.
You've Got to Be Bloody Kidding Me!
First week of January, I reached out to the agent to follow up on the final lease document.
He advised he still hadn't got hold of the owner but was continuing to try.
At this point, we started to get a bit concerned.
I said to Kylie, "I'm going to go past the factory, just to see if anything's going on down there."
I just had this gut feeling something was wrong.
I drove down to the factory to find the doors up and a crew of painters in there painting the floors.
What the hell is going on?
It looked to me like someone else was moving in.
I called the agent.
"Mate, what the hell is going on? I've just driven past and it looks like someone else is moving in."
He wasn't sure either.
"Trent, we didn't lease it out to anyone else. It was yours. I'm going to have to try to get through to the owner and find out what the hell's going on."
He called me back a few hours later.
Turns out the owner had listed the property for lease with multiple agents, and just prior to Christmas, someone came in with an offer the same as mine.
But as they were just setting up a mechanic's workshop, the owner thought it was easier to deal with than a brewery.
Well, I did lose my shit this time.
This time it had cost us money.
In fairness, the agent wasn't aware of what was going on and, of course, was also annoyed he'd lost a commission on it.
He offered to help us find somewhere and came back to me with a bunch of options to look at.
Could Pakenham Be the Answer?
I met the agent out in Pakenham in a new industrial area.
We hadn't looked down here previously, but after reading a lot about it being a big growth corridor and the availability of good properties, we decided to have a look.
Kylie grew up down this way, some of my family live down here, and we'd spent a bit of time down here over the years.
I ended up looking through half a dozen factories in the area, and just about all of them were suitable.
Two of the factories were in the same block and shared a common car park.
These were looking like good options!
The agent, to fast-track things and avoid wasting my time, had already spoken with the owners of each, and both had no issues with a brewery being built in them.
We may be onto a winner.
Surely we can get one out of the two?