About

As group general counsel at AVID Property Group, Nicole Bannerman is the sole advisor on risk, strategy, compliance and more, operating within a complex and evolving national property development business environment. When Bannerman first joined, AVID was only one year into its separation from INVESTA and the group legal counsel function was ripe for remoulding to a role suited to a private equity property development business that differed greatly from the structure and constraints of being a division of Investa. Bannerman has reinvented the governance framework for AVID company policies and corporate compliance, and as sole legal counsel she has had to set up board approved delegations of authority to ensure document processing and execution is filtered into the senior management positions of the business to ensure only material projects are dealt with at executive level.

She has also developed a document execution template and process to facilitate the shift to senior management and business responsibilities for contract management, negotiations and execution. Bannerman also manages and has enhanced the company’s contract management platform and developed the company’s bespoke intranet platform, also managing the legal library consisting of all company, governance and legal content. In addition to her legal role, Bannerman is the crisis manager and privacy officer as well as head of corporate governance and company secretary in charge of managing quarterly board and risk audit committee meetings. Bannerman highlights that, ‘AVID is on a steep growth trajectory with a five year plan which commenced in 2016 to have an asset value over $1bnAUD in 2021. AVID is well on its way in achieving this objective having acquired in excess of $70mAUD of assets in the past 12 months and is highly capitalised with an objective to acquire in excess of $279mAUD of assets in the next 12 months’. Bannerman has managed the funding documentation and provided advice on AVIDs debt funding capability over the past 18 months.

This has involved liaison with AVID’s leading local funding provider as well as an EOI that has gone to the marked in the past six months. Also in terms of major successful disputes, Bannerman successfully settled a contract dispute in the commercial division of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on the final day of the hearing with a government agency in June 2018 for an amount exceeding $1mAUD, and resolved on the first day of the hearing before a commissioner of VCAT a planning dispute that had the potential, if not resolved, to impact land value of one of AVID’s most successful businesses.