Real Estate & M&A

Real estate due diligence has changed the outcome of M&A deals I’ve worked on. Many times.

The financial, legal, environmental, technical and commercial work must be done thoroughly. But real estate rarely makes that list.

Examples? Nobody had reviewed the urban planning status of a site the target’s entire business depended on. A change in the local planning framework would have revoked the operating license for the core business the deal was built around.

That finding went to the board. And the deal changed.

I wasn’t in that meeting myself, but the work I did was.

Real estate is still treated as an administrative layer in most M&A processes. That’s a structural gap. The physical, legal, and regulatory conditions of a site are the operating conditions of the business itself, and that layer rarely gets the same rigour as financial or legal due diligence. And there are more factors of importance.

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