What the market was actually selling

What the book was offering

Ask an investor what they are looking for in commercial property and you will usually hear some version of the same answer: income they can rely on, and a reason the income might grow. A lease with term left, a rent sitting under market, a building that could be split.

We read every opportunity signal across 1,539 live commercial listings to see how much of that the advertised market was actually carrying.

The shape is not subtle. Buy-and-hold is the largest signal in the book at 611 listings, followed by value-add at 416 and long WALE at 224. At the other end: rental reversion 30, short WALE 9, under-rented 7.

It is an income market

534 listings carried buy-and-hold with no other angle stated. 340 carried value-add alone. And 77 listings carried both, a value-add proposition with a buy-and-hold component underneath it, which is the combination most investors say they want and the market supplies about five per cent of the time.

Across every opportunity signal in the book, buy-and-hold accounts for roughly two thirds.

Upside is 2.2% of the book

Put the two upside signals together and count them once, three listings carry both, and the total is 34 of 1,539 listings. 2.2%.

30 were flagged rental reversion, where the passing rent sits below market. 7 were flagged under-rented, where the rent is clearly below a comparable rate per square metre.

That is the whole visible reversion opportunity in a national commercial book of more than fifteen hundred campaigns, over a two-month window.

The signal and the number behind it

A signal tells you a proposition exists. A figure tells you how big it is. They arrive together less often than you would assume.

224 listings carried a long WALE. 79 of them gave the WALE in years. Among those that did, the median was 10.0 years, a genuinely long income runway, and worth knowing.

30 listings were flagged rental reversion. 3 of them disclosed a net income. Reversion is a claim about the gap between passing rent and market rent, and the passing rent is one half of it.

9 listings carried a short WALE. 1 of them gave the number.

Across the whole book, 93 listings of 1,539 carried a WALE in years at all, at a median of 8.2.

None of that is a criticism of how these campaigns are written. A listing is a marketing document and its job is to get the building in front of buyers, not to be a data room. It is simply a practical statement about how much of the proposition can be sized from the advertisement, and the answer is: the signal travels a long way further than the number does.

Twenty-nine confirmed strata opportunities

The strata play is the one that never survives a skim: a multi-tenanted building still sitting on a single title, where the subdivision has not been done and therefore is still available to do.

We ran our own strata screen across all 1,539 listings. It is deterministic and works only from the listing’s own words, so the same listing reads the same way every time.

29 listings, 1.9% of the book, are confirmed. 19 where the listing states the title count against the number of tenancies, and 10 where the agent names the subdivision as the play outright. A further 4 are offered en bloc with no piecemeal alternative.

Wider, softer reads exist: a freestanding building with several occupancies, or several tenancies with nothing said about tenure either way. Those are worth opening, but they are not the same claim, so they are reported in the method rather than added to the 29.

Where the multi-tenanted stock sits

On the wide read, childcare and retail carry the highest share of multi-tenanted stock, and industrial the lowest. That ordering is what you would expect, a childcare centre or a strip of shops is far more likely to be several occupancies under one roof than a single-tenant shed is.

It is a useful place to start looking. It is not a shortlist: the confirmed 29 is the shortlist.

How to use it

• Do not go looking for reversion in the listings. 2.2% of the book advertises it, and what is advertised is usually already priced. Reversion is found by reading leases against market evidence, not by filtering a portal.
• Treat a long-WALE claim as a question, not a fact, until the years arrive. 79 of 224 carried the number. The other 145 may well have the term, ask for it.
• A reversion claim without an income is unsized. Three of thirty carried one. It is the first thing to request.
• If you want strata plays, you need a screen, not a search. There were 29 confirmed across the whole national book in two months. No amount of scrolling finds those reliably.
• Expect an income market. Roughly two thirds of every signal in the book is buy-and-hold. If your mandate needs upside, most of your work will happen off-market or inside the lease, not in the advertisement.

Method and limitations

The live commercial sourcing feed: 1,539 campaigns, read 16 September 2026.

Opportunity signals come from the fixed taxonomy in `src/lib/sourcing.ts`. A listing can carry more than one, so the signal counts do not sum to the book.

The strata read is the shipped `strataOpportunity()` screen run over all 1,539 listings with the same inputs the board passes. It is pure and deterministic, the same listing reads the same way every time, and it works only from the listing’s own words.

Limitations.

• One feed, not a census of Australian commercial campaigns.
• A signal is read from the agent’s own copy. A listing that does not mention reversion is not evidence that there is none, only that the advertisement did not raise it.
• Where a listing did not carry a WALE or an income, that is recorded as not sized. It is a statement about the advertisement, not about the asset or the agent.
• The confirmed strata tier is reported as the headline because it needs no inference. The softer tiers are published alongside it rather than folded into the same number.

General information only, prepared for a professional audience. Not financial, investment or valuation advice, and not a comment on any particular listing, vendor or agent. We are not registered valuers.