Matt Aubrey on asset disposition in a year of closures

Matt Aubrey, Managing Director of Gordon Brothers in Australia, on the hard mathematics of asset disposition through 2020, the retailers that closed for good, and the tactical playbook for unwinding a store network at speed.

Gordon Brothers is a global asset disposition and advisory firm. Matt Aubrey runs the Australian operation. He talked to the bureau in June 2020, two months into the wave of retail closures that defined the first year of the pandemic.

"Asset disposition is a service business at the worst moment of a client's year."

Asset disposition is a service business at the worst moment of a client's year. The phone rings because something has gone wrong. The work is to make sure something else does not go wrong on top of it.

There are two playbooks. The orderly wind-down, where the tenant has time and the landlord is reasonable, takes weeks. The emergency wind-down, where the tenant is in administration and the landlord has changed the locks, takes days. We ran both in 2020. The emergency book outsold the orderly one for the first time in a decade.

On Record · Matt Aubrey · 11 June 2020 · Archived by Bridge Street Bureau