Succession is one of the most emotionally charged things a business-owning family ever does. It carries a lifetime of work, a set of relationships that don't fit on a balance sheet, and a quiet wish that everyone comes out of it feeling fairly treated. That's hard enough on its own. It gets harder when the family's wealth is locked inside assets that can't easily be turned into cash or split between people.
I've sat in enough of these conversations to know they rarely founder on goodwill. Families usually want to do the right thing by each other. Where they get stuck is on the mechanics — and more often than not, the mechanics come back to the premises.
The liquidity problem at the heart of family succession
In a typical owner-operated industrial business in South-East Queensland, a large share of family wealth sits in two places: the operating business and the premises it occupies. Neither is liquid. Neither can be divided at a stroke. On paper the family is wealthy; in practice the wealth is hard to move.
When succession arrives — whether carefully planned or forced suddenly by health, age, or a change in family circumstances — the practical questions get difficult fast. How do you fund a buyout of a retiring founder who needs capital to live on? How do you treat children who aren't active in the business as fairly as those who are? How do you give the next generation a clean start rather than handing them assets they can't actually deploy?
Why the building is usually the hardest piece
The operating business, with the right structures and advice, can usually be valued and then transferred or sold. The property is the stubborn one. It's a single, large, illiquid asset that doesn't lend itself to neat division.
If the next generation is to own the building, they have to fund it — on top of whatever they're already taking on to run the business. If outgoing shareholders or a retiring founder are to be paid out, that capital has to come from somewhere. So in many successions the building just sits there, unresolved, while everything else gets dealt with — and it quietly complicates and slows the entire process, sometimes for years.
How a leaseback unlocks a fair handover
A sale and leaseback addresses exactly this knot. Walter Taylor acquires the freehold, and the business remains in the premises under a long-term commercial lease, operating as it always has. The difference is that the value previously locked in the building becomes liquid.
Those proceeds can then do real work inside the succession plan — funding a buyout of outgoing shareholders, providing retirement capital for a founder who has earned it, or equalising distributions so that children outside the business are treated as fairly as those within it. The capital becomes a tool the family can actually use, instead of a number on a valuation that nobody can spend.
And the incoming generation inherits or acquires the operating business as a tenant, not a property owner. Their energy and their capital go into running and growing the business, not into carrying a building.
Why there is no one-size-fits-all answer here
I'd caution against treating any structure, including this one, as a template. Succession is specific to every family, every business, and every set of relationships in the room. A leaseback is a tool, not a plan — it has to fit inside a broader strategy that your legal, financial, and tax advisers have shaped around your particular circumstances.
The interactions matter: tax treatment, the timing of the sale relative to other steps, how the lease is documented, how the proceeds flow. These are not details to improvise. Get the right advice and get it early, because decisions made in the wrong order are expensive to unwind once commitments are in place.
Why starting earlier almost always helps
The hardest successions I've seen are the ones forced suddenly — by ill health, a death, or a relationship breaking down — with no plan in place and no liquidity to fall back on. The calmest are the ones where the family started thinking years ahead, while there was still time to choose rather than react.
Dealing with the building early is a big part of that head start. A leaseback completed well before any handover gives the lease time to settle into an ordinary commercial arrangement, puts liquidity on the table before it's urgently needed, and lets the family make decisions about fairness and structure without a clock running. None of it commits you to a particular succession outcome; it simply widens the options and lowers the pressure. The earlier the premises stop being the unresolved question, the more room everyone has to get the human side of the transition right — which, in a family business, is usually the part that matters most.
The bottom line
A fair succession is hard when the family's wealth is trapped inside a building that can't be divided. Separating the property from the business through a leaseback can release the liquidity a calm, equitable handover usually needs — without forcing the next generation to carry an asset they didn't choose.
If you're working through a succession and the premises is part of the puzzle, we're straightforward to talk to, and we're happy to work alongside the advisers you already have engaged. This isn't legal, tax, or financial advice — please take your own on your specific situation. But if the building is the piece that keeps stalling the plan, it's worth knowing there's a clean way to deal with it.