Five Things to Consider 18 Months Before Your Office Lease Expires

Eighteen months sounds like a long time. In lease planning, it is the minimum runway a tenant needs to make a genuinely informed decision rather than a reactive one. Leave it later and your options narrow — the market moves on, and the best spaces are taken by tenants who started earlier.

1. Establish your requirements first

Before you speak to a single landlord or agent, understand what you actually need — not in square metres, but in how your people work. How many workstations? What collaboration ratio? What meeting, breakout and quiet space? A defensible spatial brief is the foundation everything else is built on.

2. Understand your true costs

Your rent is one line. Make-good, incentive structures, fitout, furniture, IT, moving and dilapidations all sit beneath it. Map the full cost of staying against the full cost of going — on like-for-like terms — before you compare options.

3. Test the market early

The market you see at month 18 is not the market you will transact in at month six. Testing early tells you what is available, what incentives are being struck, and which landlords are genuinely motivated — intelligence that shapes your strategy.

4. Compare stay versus go on equal terms

A renewal is rarely free. Landlords know your moving cost and price accordingly. Compare the fully-loaded cost of staying — including any refurbishment and the incentive you could command by threatening to leave — against the cost of a move.

5. Select your specialists before you need them

The tenant rep, the designer, the project manager, the fitout contractor — each has a phase. Identifying and pairing them early means no phase starts late, and no handoff is dropped. This is where a central strategist earns their place.

Eighteen months is not early. It is the latest a tenant can start and still choose from the full market. Begin sooner, and the choice is yours; begin later, and the market chooses for you.