Forty years reading
land, numbers and risk.

I've spent the better part of four decades in New Zealand property — across development, investment and finance structuring, through every kind of market this country has thrown up.

I've bought, built, consented, restructured and sold through every kind of market this country has thrown up, and the through-line has always been the same: understanding a site's real numbers before anyone puts a shovel in the ground.

Today my work is concentrated in Auckland, where I focus on getting more housing out of well-located land — higher-density and social-housing schemes in metropolitan zones, and the minor-dwelling and granny-flat opportunities opened up by the 2026 regulatory changes. I run detailed feasibility on every project: hybrid development schemes, cashflow modelling, sensitivity analysis. In development, the difference between a good deal and a bad one is usually visible in the model long before it's visible on site.

Alongside the developments, I structure the finance that makes them work. I came into property having spent three years inside a merchant bank and finance company, learning the money game from the lender's side of the desk — which is why second-tier property finance is a space I know well. Most developers only ever see it as a borrower; I've seen how these deals get assessed and priced from both chairs.

Property has been the constant through all of it, but development runs in cycles, and cycles have troughs. So alongside it I've built cashflow businesses to carry the quiet stretches — starting in the late 1980s with a carpet and vinyl recovery business doing flood uplift work for insurance companies, and since then an indoor climbing gym, a rest home and hospital, and a sales-training company. Different industries, same discipline: understand the numbers, build the operation, make it perform.

Not every one of those years or every deal went the way I planned — development rarely runs in a straight line, and I've had my share of both. What's kept me in it for forty years is simple: I still love the work. What I've really accumulated over that time is judgement — an instinct for which sites will work, which consents are worth chasing, and where the risk actually sits.