We sat down with Alex Cook in his Melbourne office in March. He had just settled a $42m hotel sale that took 14 months from listing to settlement. We asked him what he had learned that he didn't expect to.
"The first thing is that long deals are not failed deals," he said. "There is a story in the industry that anything that doesn't settle in six months is broken. That is not true. The complex transactions take time because the diligence is real."
He went on: "What changes is the relationship. At three months you are negotiating. At fourteen months you are co-pilots. The vendor and the buyer have lived through the same stress, and the broker has been the constant. That is when the value of having an experienced broker actually shows up."
Alex joined ResortBrokers in 2015 after eight years on the institutional side. He runs the national hotels desk and has settled over $400m in transactions over the past decade.