Lessons from a multi-country consolidation: lease, fit-out and divestment in seven markets

Multi-country real estate programmes fail in predictable ways. Local teams optimise for local outcomes; regional leadership optimises for headline savings; and the contracts written in year one quietly compound risk by year three. The most expensive lesson we have learned, from running a US$35M consolidation across seven CWAR markets, is that programme governance — not deal terms — determines whether the savings hold.

The brief was straightforward in structure and difficult in practice. Rationalise warehouses and offices across Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Angola, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Hit a structural savings target. Free up capital for sustainability reinvestment. Preserve operational continuity through the transition. Each country had its own legal framework, tenancy conventions and disposal market — and several were in periods of currency stress that materially changed exit economics mid-programme.

What worked was a single regional decision rights matrix, applied identically across markets, that drew a clear line between what local teams owned (operational continuity, tenant relations) and what the regional programme owned (deal economics, divestment timing, capital reallocation). The matrix was three pages. Most of the value was in the conversations that produced it.

What changed our thinking was how much of the upside came from disposal rather than acquisition. The cleanest dollars in the programme were unlocked by exiting the right assets at the right moment — not by negotiating new leases. We now scope rationalisation engagements with disposal expertise on the team from day one, where previously we treated it as a downstream workstream.