A planner who learnt what delay costs from both sides of the counter

The first development plan I worked on took longer to approve than the houses it described took to build. In 1996, as a planner at the City of Kallanbrook on Melbourne's western edge, I helped prepare the plan for a 2,400-lot estate on former grazing land. The developer had its finance, its builders and its first buyers lined up. What it lacked was an agreement on who would pay for the trunk drainage, and settling that between the council, the water authority and the developer took twenty-six months. The developer's project manager came to our front counter most weeks with the same question. I remember thinking, at twenty-five, that his impatience was his problem. It took several years on the other side of the counter to see that it was everybody's.

I grew up in Geelong, the son of a surveyor and a primary-school teacher, and studied planning at Ardencourt University because it combined maps with arguments. I graduated at the end of 1993 and joined Kallanbrook in February 1994. Growth-area councils then were short of staff and long on applications, and by 1997 I was coordinating six planners responsible for outline plans and development contributions covering about 14,000 future homes. That work taught me how planning decisions are really made: by officers writing reports against deadlines, by councillors weighing objections from people who already live nearby, and by agencies whose timetables nobody else controls. It also taught me to read a refusal for what it is actually saying, which has proved more useful to me as a chief executive than I expected.

In 1999 I joined Yarrendale Communities, a family-owned developer of masterplanned estates in Melbourne's west and north, as a development manager. The family measured success in lots settled and roads finished when promised. Over seven years I worked on four estates totalling about 6,800 lots and became general manager of development in 2003. I learnt to build a feasibility, to negotiate with civil contractors and to settle disagreements with a council before lodging anything, when they are cheapest. I also studied part-time for a master's in applied finance at Tamberlin Business School, finishing in 2005, because I could design an estate but could not explain to a lender what it was worth.

In 2006 I moved to Sydney to join Tannock Industrial Partners, which managed unlisted funds of warehouses and distribution centres for superannuation and overseas pension investors. I ran its development programme and, from 2009, its main fund. The timing taught me the most important lesson of my career. When credit markets seized, the fund's gearing stood at 44% against a lending covenant of 50%, and two of our banks were reducing their property exposure. I recommended selling nine estates, about a fifth of the fund, well below their recent valuations, and asking investors for new equity in proportion to their holdings. Several investors were angry and one stayed out of later funds. The fund kept its lenders, finished every development it had started and was buying again by 2011. I came away convinced that an owner who waits for the market to confirm a value it already doubts is usually choosing the dearer path.

Corvalla recruited me in February 2013 to build a logistics business inside what was then mostly an office and retail group. In four years the logistics portfolio grew from A$0.4 billion to A$1.6 billion, and we formed the Corvalla Logistics Partnership with Skarholt Pension Fund to develop estates in Melbourne's west and Sydney's south-west. I became chief investment officer in July 2017, responsible for acquisitions, sales, development and the investment committee's papers. In 2019 I proposed that we enter build-to-rent housing, then a young asset class in Australia, and our first building, 312 homes in Moonee Ponds, opened in 2022.

I became chief executive in July 2021, when office still made up 54% of our balance sheet and occupancy in our Melbourne towers had not recovered from the lockdowns. Interest rates began rising ten months later. Most of the decisions on this site come from what followed: valuing the office portfolio independently in the middle of the downturn, selling four towers, resetting the distribution, and changing how we contract builders and approach planning authorities. I made mistakes in that period, including selling a Brisbane tower before I needed to, and I describe them where they belong.

I run the group through an executive committee of six and a board that receives bad news first. I ask for the case against every major proposal in writing, and I want a paper's recommendation in its opening paragraph. Colleagues would probably say I am more at ease with a planning officer or a site foreman than on an investor roadshow, and that I return to one question more often than they would like: would we buy this today, at this price, knowing what we now know? Outside Corvalla I have been a non-executive director of Arrowmere Community Housing, a not-for-profit provider, since 2019. I live in Melbourne with my wife, a paediatric physiotherapist; our two children are at university.

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