MHD INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY
THE uTENANT & JLL PARTNERSHIP
For the first time since uTenant secured the backing of global real estate services business JLL, MHD talks with uTenant’s top brass – together with JLL’s Head of Industrial & Logistics Brokerage in Australia – to explore the warehouse disruptor’s early success, and why JLL realised that backing them was the right bet.
W
hile the partnership between warehousing disruptor uTenant and global property services firm JLL is relatively recent – formalised earlier this year, with JLL taking a minority shareholder stake that bolstered uTenant’s growth potential while maintaining the latter’s unshakeable commitment to complete independence – the seeds of its inception were planted many years ago, says Greg Pike, Head of Industrial & Logistics Brokerage in Australia for JLL. “My relationship with Matt Sampson [Founder & Managing Director of uTenant] goes back many years to when we were colleagues at another agency,” says Greg. “I went to JLL, and Matt struck out on a new path to create uTenant.” Nevertheless, the conversation between the two never stopped, with Greg half-jokingly admitting that in the early days, “Matt would be bouncing ideas off me over beers and I’d be telling
him all the reasons they wouldn’t work. It would be fair to say I’ve modified some of my positions since then.” Kyle Rogers, Co-founder at uTenant, corrects Greg’s somewhat selfdeprecating take on events. He says the current partnership wouldn’t have been possible but for Greg’s willingness to keep on listening and probing and. Greg and JLL soon realised this was a perfect partnership and could see the potential benefits to clients. Both sides agree that JLL and uTenant’s partnership was the result of transparent dialogue, a relationship built on trust, and a mutual interest in bestserving the tenant-side customer. Matt Sampson’s original innovation in starting uTenant was to create a platform that connected landlords and tenants on a fixed fee model, whereby potential tenants could tap into uTenant’s vast ecosystem of landlords with ease and transparency – something that previously could not be done – and know
they were getting the best deal because uTenant didn’t take commissions from and wasn’t beholden to any commercial real estate agent. Kyle – whom Matt brought on and whose role in expanding uTenant merited him his title “Co-founder”– added to uTenant’s original business proposition the idea of “pallet matching”, whereby those with excess warehouse capacity could be matched with product owners in need of extra storage capacity. Kyle recalls sitting with Matt in uTenant’s original office – just the two of them – with a whiteboard up and ideas flowing, when the “lightbulb moment” hit. At the time, uTenant was already offering its on-demand warehouse matching service but looking to charge a margin during those initial stages. “We had a major lightbulb moment when we started to truly listen to our customers – finding out exactly what they needed and how we could add more value,”
uTenant Founder & Managing Director Matt Sampson and Co-Founder Kyle Rogers.
MHD DECEMBER 2021 | 39
