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Market note · Sep 2025

You do not have 800 negotiations. You have 74.

Rent reduction programmes fail when they treat every lease as an opportunity. Leverage is concentrated, and it is measurable in advance.

Marc FontaineHead of Real Estate Advisory · 6 min read

The instinct in a portfolio rent programme is to write to every landlord. It is also the fastest way to get nothing, because a landlord who receives the same letter as three hundred others correctly reads it as a bluff.

Leverage exists where three conditions overlap: the site is genuinely substitutable, the landlord has concentration exposure across your estate, and the lease has a break or expiry inside the planning horizon. In the portfolios we have run, that intersection covers between 8% and 14% of sites.

Concentrate there, negotiate as a portfolio with the landlords who hold the most of you, and trade term for rate. Extension is the cheapest currency a tenant has and the one landlords value most.

This note reflects transactions completed by the group and is published for information only. It is not an appraisal, a valuation opinion or an offer of credit.

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