Developing Design-Led Industrial Parks Without Capital - Tim Kourtaibe, Freeform

Found a little site, it's too small for any of them.

You know, the mandate was nothing less than 40 townhouses or, or 80 lots.

Uh, it was about a 10-townhouse site in Hampton Park.

Mm-hmm.

And actually, I was trying to get onto the neighbor's property, couldn't, couldn't get onto them, so I left the ne- the neighbor with the smaller property my details, and he called me about six months later and said, "Look, Tim, um, you know, I know that you work with developers.

I, I wanna sell my property.

Can we come have a chat?" And, um, he said, you know, "Tim, um, all I want's a million bucks.

I need 12-month settlement so I can find somewhere to live, and I don't wanna deal with agents.

So what can we do?" And I'm sort of doing some numbers in my head, and by that point, you know, I'd, uh, because, uh, we were putting together these proposals on sites, I could sort of, you know, I could cut up a site pretty quickly in my head.

I thought, "Okay, well, probably fit 10 townhouses if we do, do it this way." You know, so I'm sort of doing a feasibility in my head and I'm thinking, "Okay, maybe, maybe this could work." I went back to the office, um, did the first sort of rudimentary feasibility for myself and, you know, it was 20% return on cost, um, 1.3 million bucks profit, and I thought, "Can't be that easy," you know? Uh, didn't have any money though.

Uh, and by that point, I'd sort of become friends with who'd become my future boss, um, Oscar Leadlen, who, who you know.

And, um, we were sort of catching up, talking property for hours.

You know, we'd, um, he would, um, I would give him some advice with some sales and marketing, um, strategies for his project and- Yep ... um, because the market was quite tough at, at the time, and he would teach me about private equity and, um, raising capital and those sorts of things.

So we were kind of exchanging notes, catching up, and I was sort of, um, uh, progressing on this site.

So was introduced to some equity partners, um, had this meeting.

It was like an episode of Shark Tank.

Yeah.

I walked into the room, the pitch, well, it was on the screen.

They're sitting on the other side of the table and, you know, for three hours, they grill on, grilled on everything.

You know, what happens if you can't get a permit? What happens if the market shifts? What happens if the builder goes bust? And- How'd you go? What, what, what rating out of 10 would you give yourself? Well, I mean, we, well, there was not, there was a s- a, like a successive meeting, so I think it went well.

Yeah.

But look, they, they, they said effectively, "We like you.

We love the opportunity.

It's a bit small for us.

We normally look at some, some larger things, but we do like to get behind young guys like yourself, so we wanna, we wanna progress it further." And I remember telling Oscar about it and, um- And then not long after that, he called me in and said, "Hey, look, you know, um, effectively I, I wanna offer you a job.