Chief Strategy Officer Australia
A question first asked across a council counter
In the winter of 1996 I assessed one of my first development applications at Tallangra Shire Council, a rural council in the Central West of New South Wales. It came from a wheat-farming couple in their seventies who wanted to build a small house on a town block because the drive out to their property had become too much for him. The application was simple. What I remember is the conversation at the counter, when she asked whether the town's medical centre would still be open when they needed it more. I had no answer, and the planning controls I was applying did not ask the question.
I had finished a bachelor of town planning at Tarravale University at the end of 1995. Over three years at the council I moved from house applications to drafting part of the shire's strategic plan, including a chapter on housing for older residents. The work taught me that a small town's capacity to support ageing rests on a few things a planner does not control: a general practice that can recruit, a hospital that keeps its emergency department, a bus that runs on market day and children who live within a couple of hours.
In 1999 I joined Calvorne Planning Associates in Sydney and spent five years preparing approvals for apartment, retail and seniors-housing projects. The pace was different, and so were the clients. I learnt how much of a project's value is created or lost during assessment, how a design improves when a council's objection is understood rather than fought, and how often a developer's feasibility study assumed a decision date that nobody had discussed with the consent authority.
Mardellow Land Company, a Newcastle developer of master-planned estates in the Hunter, hired me in 2004 as a development manager. I took projects from rezoning through civil works to land sales, with budgets of up to A$45 million. One estate included a retirement-village site that we sold to an operator, and I noticed how differently that buyer valued it: not by the lots, but by decades of resident turnover. I studied part time for a graduate diploma in property valuation at Wenmorrow College of Property Studies, finishing in 2009, because I wanted to understand that arithmetic properly.
That led to Strathmorlan Property Advisory in 2010, where I valued and advised on retirement villages for owners, lenders and not-for-profit boards. A village valuation depends on how long residents stay, how house prices in the surrounding market move, what departure fees the contracts allow and what discount rate the risk deserves. Small changes in those assumptions move the answer a long way. I also saw, village after village, that those built in towns without services resold slowly at every turnover, whatever the original brochure had promised.
Kurrawind's chief executive asked me to run development and planning in 2016. I moved my family to Bathurst and led a team of 22 through a programme of new villages and extensions worth between A$60 million and A$90 million a year. In 2020 I supported an option over a coastal site, a recommendation I later reversed and describe in the first case on this site. In July 2021 the board created the chief strategy officer role, and I took it.
My job now is to give the board a small number of clear choices: which towns, which villages to renew, which partners and what rate of growth our balance sheet and our purpose can sustain together. I work closely with the chief financial officer on funding and valuation, with the operations director on what residents tell us, and with the development team I used to lead, which I am careful not to run from a distance. Most of my week goes into a few documents: the ten-year plan, partnership terms and the papers that ask directors to commit capital for decades.
I no longer sign valuations, I am not an engineer, and resident contracts are administered by colleagues who know the retirement-village legislation in detail. I present to our board and its investment and development committee, and since January 2024 I have been Kurrawind's nominee director on the board of our joint venture with Corwennan Pension Trust. That seat is not independent, and I have not yet held an independent directorship. I would like to learn that role on a board where planning, long-lived assets and people's homes meet.
Open to Board appointments
Languages / English
A leadership conviction
Residents buy into a village in their seventies and expect it to serve them into their nineties. The land, the approval and the first sales campaign matter for a few years; the hospital, the general practice and the bus matter for decades. I would rather grow more slowly in towns that can keep that promise than quickly in places that look good in a feasibility study.
- Retirement villages
- 27
- Regional New South Wales, June 2026
- Homes for older residents
- 3,680
- 3,420 independent-living units and 260 serviced apartments
- Company revenue
- A$214m
- Year to 30 June 2026; not-for-profit operator
Board & advisory record
Current appointments
Kurrawind Corwennan Villages Pty Ltd
Nominee director for Kurrawind
2024–present
Education & credentials
- Bachelor of town planning
- Tarravale University · 1995
- Graduate diploma in property valuation
- Wenmorrow College of Property Studies · 2009
Perspectives from colleagues
Harrison brought the board a recommendation to sell a site he had once argued for, and he set out his earlier reasoning as fairly as his new case. We did not all agree, but every director understood exactly what we were choosing and what it would cost.
As a graduate he spent more time at the front counter than most of us thought necessary. The service map he drew for our five towns was rough, but it was the first time anyone in the office had asked what an older resident would need in fifteen years.
Harrison negotiated hard on the resident terms of our joint venture, harder than on the returns. When we disagreed about charges at the first village, he argued from the venture's interests rather than his employer's, which is why we kept talking.