"Off-market" has acquired a slight mystique it doesn't deserve, and "on-market" is sometimes treated as the only serious option. Both framings are unhelpful. A public campaign and a discreet direct sale are simply two processes with different strengths, and a clear-eyed vendor picks the one that fits the asset and the moment. Here's the honest case for each, without the salesmanship.
The honest case for a public campaign
A well-run campaign, handled by a good agent, manufactures competition — and competition tends to produce the highest price, especially where a wide pool of buyers exists and the market is active. If you genuinely don't know what the market will pay, or the asset is distinctive enough that only broad exposure will find its natural owner, a campaign is hard to argue against.
It also produces a clean paper trail: a signed confidentiality deed from each party, a structured due-diligence window, and a documented record of who offered what. In some ownership structures — trustees, co-owners, or entities with governance obligations — that demonstrable, arm's-length process has value in its own right, quite apart from the price it achieves.
The honest case for a discreet process
The price a campaign pursues is bought with time, disruption and uncertainty. A typical campaign runs over months. Your tenant knows the asset is for sale from the moment the board goes up. Competitors and customers can see the listing. And after all of it, you may still not land a buyer who settles cleanly.
A direct approach to a funded, credible buyer strips most of that away. The process is shorter, far fewer people know, and where the fundamentals are right the path to an executed contract is more direct. What you trade away is the price tension that open competition creates — which is precisely why this route suits vendors who already have a firm view on an acceptable figure rather than those relying on the market to discover it.
It's also worth being clear about what "discreet" does and doesn't mean. It isn't secrecy for its own sake, and it isn't a way of dodging proper documentation — a direct sale still runs on a contract, a due-diligence period and the same legal rigour as any other. What's compressed is the audience and the timeline, not the care. For many vendors that's the whole appeal: a serious transaction conducted without turning the asset's status into public information.
Certainty of close is worth a real premium
A headline price tells you what a buyer is willing to offer, not whether they'll complete. Those are different things, and the gap between them has sunk many deals. We're funded and don't rely on syndication or an external equity raise to settle, which is what allows us to commit and follow through on the timeline we agree.
When you weigh competing offers, weigh the certainty alongside the number. A slightly lower price from a buyer who will definitely close can be worth more than a higher one that's contingent on finance, a capital raise, or a committee. Whatever process you run, ask each prospective buyer directly how they're funding the acquisition — and listen carefully to how specific the answer is.
How to think about the decision
Most vendors carry a rough internal sense of what they want for the asset. If a discreet process is likely to land near that figure, the savings in time and disruption are real and immediate. If there's genuine uncertainty about value — or the asset is unusual and the buyer pool is thin — a campaign earns its keep by surfacing demand you couldn't otherwise reach.
Be honest, too, about the tenant. A campaign almost guarantees they'll learn of the sale early; a discreet process lets you choose when and how that conversation happens. For an owner-occupier tenant or a long-standing relationship, that timing can matter more than a marginal difference in price.
And factor in the cost of a failed campaign, which rarely gets counted. Marketing spend is largely sunk whether or not the asset sells, and an asset that has been to market and not transacted can carry a faint stigma into its next attempt — buyers wonder why it didn't clear. A direct process carries none of that public footprint, so a conversation that doesn't proceed simply ends quietly, leaving your optionality fully intact.
Why it needn't be either/or
The two routes aren't a binary. A common and sensible sequence is to approach one or two genuinely-fitting buyers directly first, and escalate to a broader campaign only if those conversations don't produce an acceptable outcome. You preserve discretion and speed as the first option while keeping full market exposure in reserve.
A good agent can design and run exactly that sequence, and it's where a lot of the best outcomes quietly happen. We're comfortable operating in either context — direct or marketed — and we respect whatever process a vendor and their agent have chosen. If an agent introduces the opportunity, we work with them and pay their fee; the route in makes no difference to how we behave once we're at the table.
The bottom line
There's no universal answer. Optimise for open price discovery and you'll lean toward a campaign; optimise for discretion, pace and certainty and a direct sale will look attractive — and you can sequence the two to get some of both. The worst outcome is choosing by default rather than by decision.
Take your own legal and tax advice before you settle on a structure, because the consequences are specific to your circumstances. But go into the choice clear about what you're actually optimising for — that single piece of honesty does more for the result than any tactic.