Planner, developer, valuer, strategist

Mandate

Decide with the board where and how fast Kurrawind grows, renews and partners, within its not-for-profit purpose and balance sheet.

Outcomes

• Recommended selling an approved coastal option and moving A$58 million into 112 inland units
• Structured a A$320 million joint venture for three villages with Corwennan Pension Trust
• Led the case for a A$46 million retrofit of nine villages built between 1979 and 1994
• Made a town-services assessment a condition of any spending on land

Decisions in context

The board created this role because growth decisions were arriving one site at a time, each with its own champion. My first task was to give directors a way to compare towns, villages and funding paths side by side. That produced the town assessment, a ten-year capital view prepared with the chief financial officer, and a list of older villages ranked for renewal. The role is advisory in an important sense: development, operations and finance each own their delivery, and the board owns every commitment. My influence comes from framing the choice honestly, including the parts that weaken my own recommendation. Since January 2024 I have also sat as Kurrawind's nominee on the joint-venture board, a seat I hold for the organisation rather than independently. Each of the three cases on this site was decided during these years.

Reason for the move

Current role; seeking a first independent non-executive seat with the consent of our chief executive and board.

Mandate

Deliver approved villages and extensions on programme and rebuild Kurrawind's approvals record.

Outcomes

• Opened four new villages and seven extensions, adding 610 homes
• Reduced average approval time from 19 to 13 months through pre-lodgement meetings with councils
• Supported a coastal site option in 2020 that was later sold with its consent

Decisions in context

I arrived at a moment when three village applications had stalled and builders were waiting. The quickest improvement was simple: meeting each council before lodging and agreeing what a complete application looked like. Average approval time fell from 19 to 13 months over five years. My team managed designers, builders and sales handovers for four new villages and seven extensions, adding 610 homes. I also learnt the limits of a development role. My incentive was a full pipeline, and I supported a coastal option partly because it kept that pipeline healthy. When I later recommended selling it, I was correcting my own earlier judgement. That experience shapes how I now separate the person who proposes a site from the person who tests it. Directors read my development papers every month, which gave me my first regular experience of board questioning.

Reason for the move

Appointed to the newly created chief strategy officer role in July 2021.

Mandate

Build a seniors-living valuation and advisory practice for owners, lenders and boards.

Outcomes

• Valued more than 140 retirement villages for financial reporting and lending
• Advised two not-for-profit boards on village sales and redevelopment
• Built a resale-time dataset across village locations and vintages

Decisions in context

This role taught me the arithmetic of retirement villages from the outside. A valuation required a view on resident tenure, local house prices, contract terms and an appropriate discount rate, and I had to defend each one to clients who usually wanted a higher number. I built a practice of seven people and valued more than 140 villages across three states. The most useful thing I produced was not a report but a record of how long units took to resell, sorted by town and village age. It showed a clear pattern: villages in towns with weak health services resold slowly regardless of their design. Two not-for-profit boards asked for advice on selling or redeveloping villages, which gave me my first sight of how directors weigh mission against money. Both boards chose slower and smaller options than their managers had first proposed.

Reason for the move

Joined Kurrawind to apply valuation and approvals experience inside an operator.

Mandate

Take estates from rezoning through civil works to land sales.

Outcomes

• Delivered two estates totalling 1,180 lots
• Negotiated the sale of a retirement-village site within one estate to an operator
• Reduced civil-works variations on the second estate by agreeing staging with the council early

Decisions in context

Mardellow gave me responsibility for money as well as approvals. I managed two estates from rezoning to settlement, coordinating engineers, civil contractors, councils and sales agents. On the second estate I agreed the staging of roads and drainage with the council before tenders went out, and contract variations fell noticeably as a result. The decision that changed my direction was small at the time. We sold a retirement-village site within one estate, and the operator's valuation logic was completely different from ours. They were buying decades of resident turnover, not a parcel of lots. I enrolled in a part-time valuation diploma to understand that logic and completed it in 2009. By then I knew I wanted to work on retirement villages rather than subdivisions, where a council’s staging conditions had taught me how approvals shape cash flow.

Reason for the move

Moved into valuation advisory to work on retirement villages full time.

Mandate

Prepare development applications and steer them through assessment.

Outcomes

• Prepared approvals for 26 apartment, retail and seniors-housing projects
• Reworked one refused seniors-housing proposal into a smaller approved scheme
• Introduced decision dates agreed with councils into client programmes

Decisions in context

Moving from a rural council to a Sydney consultancy reversed my position across the counter. I now prepared applications rather than assessed them, for clients who measured every month of delay. I worked on 26 projects, several of them seniors housing. One had been refused before I joined; we met the objectors, reduced its height, moved the entrance away from a narrow street and secured approval for a smaller scheme. The lesson stayed with me: a refusal often contains useful design advice. I also began asking clients to agree a realistic decision date with the council rather than assume one, because their feasibility studies were frequently built on dates nobody else recognised. By 2004 I wanted to follow a project past approval and see whether the numbers held. My two graduates, meanwhile, had learnt to read objections as briefs rather than obstacles.

Reason for the move

Joined a developer to carry projects beyond approval into delivery.

Mandate

Assess development applications and contribute to the shire's strategic plan.

Outcomes

• Assessed about 380 development applications
• Drafted the chapter on housing for older residents in the shire's strategic plan
• Mapped access to health and transport services across the shire's five towns

Decisions in context

My first job was at a council serving five towns and the farms around them. I assessed about 380 applications, most of them houses, sheds and small subdivisions. Many came from older farming couples moving into town, and their questions at the front counter were rarely about setbacks. They wanted to know whether the doctor would stay and whether the hospital would keep its emergency department. When the shire began its strategic plan, my manager asked me to draft the chapter on housing for older residents. I mapped services town by town and found that two of the five could not realistically support more seniors housing. That map, crude as it was, is the ancestor of the town assessment I now take to the Kurrawind board. I left in 1999 wanting to understand how projects were financed and built.

Reason for the move

Moved to a Sydney consultancy for wider project experience.