Aldo Attanasio d'Aponte

Anyone can win a first instruction. A good pitch, a warm introduction and a credible CV will do it. The measure that actually means something is whether the client comes back, and whether they come back for the difficult work as well as the easy work.

What the pattern looks like

Over the past several years the majority of my work has come from clients I had already acted for. One hospitality operator took seven sites across London in roughly three years, from a power station development to a Fitzrovia street, Covent Garden, Mayfair, the City, a north London high street and a Southwark market scheme.

One investor assembled a portfolio of adjacent freeholds on a single west London parade across four separate acquisitions over four years. One arcade has seen me act on multiple separate units for different brands. One luxury house first instructed me on a flagship consolidation and has since returned for successive rent reviews years apart, and subsequently on further Bond Street holdings.

I am not presenting that as impressive. I am presenting it as the only evidence in this business that means anything, because every one of those clients had the option of going elsewhere and did not.

Why repeat work is a better signal than deal size

A large transaction proves an adviser was in the room. It does not prove they added value, because the client cannot run the counterfactual. They will never know what a different adviser would have achieved.

Repeat instruction is different. By the second mandate the client has seen what you do, watched a negotiation from the inside, discovered whether you told them things they did not want to hear, and found out how you behave when a deal goes wrong. Choosing you again is a judgement made with full information.

What clients return for, and what that reveals

The pattern of return is as informative as the fact of it. The instructions that follow a first acquisition are usually the unglamorous ones: a rent review, a lease renewal, a surrender, an assignment, a regear.

That matters because those are the mandates where the fee is small and the value is large. A rent review settled flat rather than ten per cent up on a £200,000 rent is worth £100,000 across the review period. A surrender negotiated well can save a year’s rent. Clients who come back for that work have understood where the money actually is over a lease term.

The multi-site relationship

Advising the same operator across seven sites is a different discipline from advising seven operators once each. You accumulate knowledge of their model: what trades, what daypart works, what the operational constraints are, which catchments suit them and which have disappointed.

By the fourth or fifth site the search narrows enormously, because you can eliminate options the client would have spent weeks considering. You also start finding sites for them rather than with them, since you know the requirement well enough to recognise it before they do.

What to look for in an adviser

• What proportion of their work comes from existing clients? Ask directly.
• Will they introduce you to a client they have acted for more than twice?
• Do they act across the whole lease lifecycle, or only on acquisitions where the fee is largest?
• Have they ever told a client not to do a deal? Ask for the example.

The uncomfortable inverse

There is a reason to be sceptical of an adviser whose work is overwhelmingly new instructions. In a market where clients transact repeatedly over decades, an adviser who is always working with someone new is telling you something, and it is worth finding out what.

Further reading: Why I Act Only for Occupiers · Anatomy of a Bond Street Consolidation · About Aldo Attanasio d’Aponte

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Aldo Attanasio d’Aponte is the founder and chief executive of Arbitrage Group, a boutique buyer-side advisory specialising in prime central London real estate. This article is general commentary and not financial, legal, planning or tax advice.