Anthony Denman:
Mark, welcome to the Property Marketing Podcast.

Mark Seymour:
Thank you, Anthony. Privilege to be here.

Anthony Denman:
No, mate. It’s been a long time coming. “Life is short. Do big things.” Quote from Robin Sharma. I don’t suppose you know who Robin Sharma is.

Mark Seymour:
His first book was something like The Monk Who Drove a Ferrari or The Monk Who Sold a Ferrari or something like that. Anyway, the first book I read was The 5 AM Club. It’s told as a tale, and he mixes into that a number of different concepts which are stoic concepts into it, and talking about how you can live your life in your best possible way.
It’s really interesting. I really needed it. I read it in 2020, right in the middle of COVID, and because I was in Victoria, everything was locked down. We were under an oppressive regime of Daniel Andrews and work started to fall apart. It was a really hard time. This book really lifted me up.
I started getting up at 5:00 AM and following his first hour treatment, which was exercise, meditation, and basically reading or journaling. It got me into a really nice rhythm and I kept that up all the way through ’21, ’22, and then I dropped the 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM in ’23 when I started to get a bit buggered.

Anthony Denman:
Do you wake up with an alarm clock to get up that early

Mark Seymour:
No. At 5:00 AM I did, but the problem I was doing is I was waking at 4:00 to get up at 5:00, so I wasn’t really getting a good night’s sleep.

Anthony Denman:
Sleep is so important though, right?

Mark Seymour:
Oh, yeah. A mate of mine who a CEO said to me after I told him this, he said, “You’re mad. You’ve got to get your sleep.” Since I rejigged it to 6:00 AM, I’m feeling much better. I don’t have the big lag in the middle of the day as I was at 5:00 AM.

Anthony Denman:
You still follow it?

Mark Seymour:
Yep.

Anthony Denman:
Do you exercise?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. I do 20 minutes of exercise.

Anthony Denman:
What does that look like?

Mark Seymour:
It’s mainly because when I was a sprinter, we did a lot of stretching, so I do five minutes of stretching, five minutes of core work, and then I do some weights.

Anthony Denman:
Where?

Mark Seymour:
At home or in the hotel, because I’m in Sydney three days a week, so I do it in the hotel. Where we work at the hub in Liverpool Street, they’ve got a little gym downstairs, so I go down there at 7:00 AM and do my work there. It goes back to a lot of stuff that he talks about in terms of life is short.
There’s this element of you’ve got to have this consistency in your life, and it’s something I’d neglected for quite a while. I think from about 2015 to, say 2020. I’d neglected it during the pretty hard times financially. Just the consistency brought me back to a place, a head space where I was calmer, more deliberate, and I could do the things I had to do.
It was almost a real godsend at the time and it’s really got me back. I think part of his quote is, “Life is short.” As you get older you start to look at the end of it and go, “It’s not that long to go compared to being 20.” You really do have to do big things, and I hope in my life I have done those big things. I’ve taken some risks. Some haven’t worked, some have, and tried to do the best things I could do.

Anthony Denman:
Can you think of an example of a particularly big thing?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. I think the biggest thing, and you appreciate this is starting my own business. I’d worked in the Australian Public Service for 15 years growing up in Canberra and risen to the level I could possibly rise to, I suspect, and then I was a square peg in a round hole and they put me on gardening leave and I decided to take a redundancy and leave.
Then I went to Bond Uni on the Gold Coast and did an MBA mainly in strategic marketing and management, because I really wanted a really good marketing degree. I loved it, because I’d worked on the ministerial committee for government advertising and that’s where I’d met Senator Richardson and Walsh and Paul Keating and all these guys.
Really the flavour. John Singleton. Even met John Singleton there one day. I was just gobsmacked by the way these people could bring a massive concept down to a very fine position and then the presence of mind at that point or the guts, if you like, to say, “That’s what we’re going to do.”
I just thought that was amazing. At 34 I went off to Bond and got a degree in that, and then I came back to Sydney where I started working for Cosway with Mark Rudder, and we were doing a lot of work there on Lendlease. That’s how I first got into property, working on Jackson’s Landing and ADI St. Mary’s.
That was a long time ago. Just working with those guys got me into a position where I could start my own business here, because people were saying to me, “Why don’t you go and do that?” It was a big brave move and it is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever done is going out on my own, and it worked.

Anthony Denman:
Do you remember specifically the moment? Did you have a client in your back pocket? Did you have money in the bank? Did you have a certain amount of weeks or months that you knew you could pay yourself to until things came to fruition? What did that look like, that moment?

Mark Seymour:
I didn’t have any money in the bank. I’d blown all the redundancy on getting the degree and I had enough to keep going, but I got a client. That’s how I did it. I got a client, and then through the friendships I’d made at Cosway and then the Capital Group, which is basically a public relations group.
I was a senior marketing bloke in each of those different companies working on property, and then they bring me up and say, “Oh, look, we’ve got a client. We don’t really want them. Do you want them?” That’s basically what happened. I started to get all their stuff flying off the back of it and I built a pretty strong little group there. Then I applied for the Victoria Park job at Landcom as their marketing manager, and I got that, and that really started the business off. Then I went on for 17 years with Landcom doing all their major projects.

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. It’s handy, but also a little bit scary, because you’ve only got one client.

Mark Seymour:
It was. I was completely dominated. I was meeting everybody in the industry, but I couldn’t work on any other projects, because you were conflicted through everything, because we were working on everything. I knew all the insights on their applications and proposals, so I really couldn’t do anything but work for Landcom, and Landcom were very good to me.
Sean O’Toole and Greg South and Jeff Joyce and Stuart McGowan, they were just fabulous to me, looked after me. Then we got to Prince Henry. We went from Victoria Park to Prince Henry at Little Bay, and that’s really where I think the first real shoots of the business being seen as something of a really good group.
We won the UDIA Marketing Award, Prince Henry won project of the year and all this sort of stuff. It was just the real fillip I needed to actually launch off the back of that. At the same time, Landcom then gave me another 12 projects to work on and the business just catapulted from there, and that basically established the business, especially Prince Henry.

Anthony Denman:
How did you find the degree? Firstly, how hard was it to get that degree?

Mark Seymour:
The MBA?

Anthony Denman:
Yeah.

Mark Seymour:
We started with 32. We finished with 14 people. It was pretty tough. It was a brutal 80 hours a week.

Anthony Denman:
80 hours a week?

Mark Seymour:
Yep. I actually had to stopped drinking. That’s how bad it was.

Anthony Denman:
I would’ve thought you had to start drinking. 80 hours a week.

Mark Seymour:
I’d go down the beach down at Mermaid Beach, walk in the sand at 7:00 AM, then go back, start work, and then work all the way through to midnight. I did that every day, Saturday and Sunday, all the way through the entire year.

Anthony Denman:
But what did that look like? What sort of work were you doing?

Mark Seymour:
We had a lot of reading to do and you were given a project to do every week. Every week you had to condense a large company, worldwide company like Merck or someone like that, and you had to condense a case study they gave you into reasons why it happened and how you could have got out of it. You had to condense that into one A4 page.
That was weekly on top of all the other things you had to read. You had four subjects you were doing at the time. Four subjects. You rolled those over every six weeks, I think. Every six weeks you rolled over into another four subjects, and you had exams at every six weeks, and you had constant work every week. There was no time. If you fell a little bit behind, you were well behind, so you just couldn’t do it. You had to keep up with everything going on.

Anthony Denman:
Condensing that dense information, right?

Mark Seymour:
Yep.

Anthony Denman:
Jeez. You would’ve loved ChatGPT at that point in time.

Mark Seymour:
Wouldn’t that have been nice? Or blinkers, too.

Anthony Denman:
Can you imagine?

Mark Seymour:
[Inaudible 00:09:13]-

Anthony Denman:
How do you reckon that has changed the landscape of learning in that regard?

Mark Seymour:
Well, I suppose going in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve given up the opportunity to have been put in a position to learn how to write. Guys like Mark Rudder and John Fry were very intense about writing. They were ex-journos and they had a certain way of doing it at Cosway, and they taught you how to write.
I couldn’t write to save myself, but they actually taught me how to do it. I’m glad I did that, because by the time ChatGPT comes along, I’m sick of writing first round drafts. I write to ChatGPT and say, “These are the things I want to say and these are the areas I want to be in. Write it up for me.” Then I’ll do probably seven or eight drafts of that until I get it into position where I think it actually works, because it needs to be personalised, needs to be to the product or to the project. But saves me an enormous amount of time. Enormous amount of time.

Anthony Denman:
I can only imagine.

Mark Seymour:
I just can’t believe how productivity has soared. At one point, I was a regional manager for a transcription group in Canberra that the attorney general’s department owned called Auscript. When we went from manual typing of transcripts, they were listening to the transcripts being directly coded directly into the computer.
I don’t know. The productivity. I think we measured, the productivity went up 200%, 300% in four months. Just incredible. Technology is incredible. I’m gobsmacked by just looking at these computers. I can’t believe how well they work, because I’ve been all the way through.
I remember seeing the first laptop arrive in one of the government departments and it was this big bloody enormous thing with a big screen on it and you had to put C, hard colon, forward slash, dot, route directory. Blah, blah, blah. Up would come a page, and we used to go, “Wow. Look at that.”
You look at this and I still can’t believe it, actually. I was just saying to my wife the other day when we were driving along and I made about four or five phone calls. We went down to Lorne on the south coast here, and I said to her, “Imagine back in my dad’s day when he used to fly around Australia for work.”
Nothing would happen. He’d read the paper, might write a few letters or something, but nothing could happen with that until he got to where he was going to. Then he had to somehow give it to someone to type it up and then he’d wait for it to come back. Then he’d amend it, send it back, get it fixed again, and away you go. Can you imagine how much time has been saved over that journey from technology? It’s incredible.

Anthony Denman:
Everything happens just so much faster, doesn’t it? It is helping humanity as opposed to just making us all busier-

Mark Seymour:
Agreed.

Anthony Denman:
… and hastening the road to destruction. Let’s hope not. MBA. Then I won’t mention any names, but cowboy type style developers. There’s a lot of interesting and very colourful developers in our category, and they don’t always necessarily subscribe to deep strategic thinking or value it.
I’m just curious as to how you handled that, coming from putting all those hours in and then having this expectation that the people with the purse strings in our category would respect that work. Then having developers turn up in Porsches and empty their pockets and say they’ve got no money and they need more time.
How did you deal with that? I’d imagine when you’re doing your MBA that there wouldn’t have been a lot of that preparation. There wouldn’t have been a lot of people talking about that you’re going to have to deal with those types of personalities and manage those expectations from those developers, which would be very different to the learnings that you’d apply to that point.

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. I think it’s one of the things. I don’t know if MBAs are different today, but the soft skill side of it wasn’t emphasised. You’re very theory based. I had a couple of ding-dongs with the odd marketing guy, professor that wouldn’t work in the real world.
I think at the time, if you were going to have any criticism of it, it was a lack of real world element within it. You were taking case studies and trying and develop, which is fine. That’s what you’re supposed to be trying to do and try to condense it down, make meaning out of it.
But what was happening is the answers or the outcomes in the real world probably weren’t going to work the way they’d structured things. I think when I got into one of the first things, I went to see a headhunter and he said, “Oh, put your MBA in your back pocket, mate, because no one wants it.”
Then I found that wasn’t true. People were saying, “Oh, you should take this guy on because he’s got an MBA.” Now, I never made anything of it other than the fact that it actually gave me a really strong structure to work from. I didn’t go around saying, “I’m an MBA, I’m an MBA.” It really gave me that ability to see things in a different way and also to be quite broad in my perspectives in which I was trying to develop something up.
I suppose because I was lucky enough to go through, I went through the Lendlease system. I met Mirvac in the early days when they were talking about quality. I was in one of those first meetings and they’re trying to position themselves as quality players. I worked on Lendlease when they were trying to group their companies before they went overseas, trying to group their companies together, which was basically in a strategic sense exactly what I’d been doing. They valued that. Look, those big companies valued it. They were impressed to have it.

Anthony Denman:
The institutional developers would, because in most instances, the people that work in those places have those qualifications as well, so there’s the respect there. It’s the developers, which are most of them, private developers who don’t have those qualifications, which most don’t. Most private developers don’t. How do you get them to respect the work, the thinking that goes into that deep strategy?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. It comes down to they can’t see the journey to the bottom line from there. They lack the ability in some respects to understand how it adds value to what they’re doing. Yet if I sit down and say to them, “How are you planning your building?” They say, “Well, we started at the foundations and we build it up.” I say, “Your strategy is your foundation.”
I’m always been gobsmacked at how they will say to you, “Come up with a forward directional statement for us and where we’re going to go and how we position ourselves. I don’t want to pay a lot of money for it, but I’m going to use it to drive my entire business.” I don’t understand how you wouldn’t want to pay for that to have that developed in the sense of a very comprehensive way to achieve what you need to achieve.
That’s part of that is, I suppose, in a sense lack of the ability to sell strategy properly in that meaningful way. Now, part of that has been through, and I’m not criticising everyone, but the ad industry has for years not sold strategy. It’s given it away, and by giving it away, they’re able to make their money out of the end product, not the front product.
It only happened at Christmas time, I was talking to another mate, and he said to me, “We’re suffering because we lack strategy. Our clients are complaining that digital marketing, we’ve got all these different groups doing different things, but they all want to take you down a different road and our results aren’t any better.”
He said, “We’ve actually recognized that we actually need an overriding strategy over it.” He sat down and said, “How do you sell strategy? We haven’t done that before.” I suppose in terms of our industry, that hasn’t been a major part of the industry, so they haven’t grown up with it in their thinking.
They’ve grown up with feasibilities and design drawings and planning a development out. They understand all that, but they understand the marketing side of it from a strategic point of view, why it fits into what they’re doing. What they’re doing, what the strategy does is it sets them on a course, which is generally a long term course to achieve greater profitability.
That’s by spending the time, positioning the product correctly, getting your narratives right, and then taking it out to market with the proper advertising and digital marketing, whatever channels you use. To me, it’s that whole comprehensive overlay that goes over the top of what you’re doing.
That allows people, allows a project, especially the big ones like I’ve worked on like Prince Henry, Little Bay, and what else? The Green Square. All those projects went through massive long term thinking to actually achieve what they’re at at the moment. We worked on a big project called Providence in South Ripley for the Shepard Brothers out of WA.
They sat down and said, “Look, we need a strategy to make this work, because it’s 7,000 lots. It’s got a town centre, two schools, a wellness health area. We needed to bring it all together. How do we bring it all together and sell it? Because what’s happening is we’re getting all this disparate comments being made left and center. People are trying to position everything differently. We need one place.”
That was my role to come in and take that into one place so it all hummed as one, and they were able to unify all those together, and eventually they sold it onto Stockland at the end of last year. But that’s a great example of how this works. You go through. I think a lot of the work I do is the investment attraction work.
Use strategy as an investment attractor process, so you’re able to sit back and look at a big master plan and say,” I don’t know if that’s going to work there or that’s going to work there.” It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle. You start to assist the developer to see it through the eyes of the buyer, whether that be commercial or retail or residential.
You start to shift things around to say, “Maybe it’s better over there or better over here.” To the point for Providence, for example, we start talking about how do we create jobs? How do we keep people here? It’s 45 minutes out of Brisbane. There’s a train line up the road. There’s a big nice freeway out to Ipswich and back into Brisbane, but how do we actually keep people here?
One of the discussions we had, and we took it as far as we could, was to get a university there so the kids could go through primary school, high school to university. That then would activate the township, so the shops would start to move, things would start to happen, and people might over time buy there as well.
The idea was to keep it rolling over, just like you’re inventing a new Australian town. Instead of looking at it as, “Here’s a development out in the middle of nowhere. Let’s just put houses on it and a couple of shops and things will be hunky dory.” That’s not, I think, the way to go, I think the way to go is actually to look at it from a completely different perspective.
We tried to do that on the Hermitage out of Camden as well, and I think that went successfully. At Tamaki, which is a big project in Auckland, which was 10,000 lots, but it’s a mixed use tender process of time to drive private development into social and affordable housing.
That had two town centers. How do you manage that process? What goes into the town centers? Why would you keep people here? How do you deal with the lower socioeconomic groups who can’t really move forward if you don’t give them somewhere to go and something to do? There’s a whole lot of process that goes into that.
I suppose in terms of strategy, that’s the level I’m thinking of, and the hard bit is then translating that into a smaller development. When I do that, take that into a smaller development, I look at that bottom line and go, “How can I improve that bottom line 10% or 20%?” How do you do that by positioning this product to work better against the competition?
What are you going to say to the market to attract that buyer into that place? How do you create a place that people really want to be part of? That’s the sort of depth that I think of when I see a project and think it through, and I applied that to Green Square, applied to Prince Henry, Victoria Park, and into Tamaki.
Even on the Barangaroo, when we started on Barangaroo, we did the first international advertising campaign on it. That presentation to Paul Keating and the other group, that was just, they said, “That’s exactly where we want to go. It’s fantastic. We hadn’t thought about it in that way, so let’s get out there and start moving it.”
There’s a whole lot of deep thinking that goes into that process, because there’s no one else behind me. It’s just me and I’ve got to stand there hand on heart and go, “This is going to work for you.” That’s what I learned many years ago that you have to back yourself, and I’ve got a nice story on that.
Peter Walsh is the senator at the time. We were looking at all these projects for Australian government and big information campaigns. I went to his office one day with five campaigns and I said to him, “Oh minister, which ones do you want to attend for?” He said, “You tell me.”
I said, “I’m 26 and you’re a minister and I’m just a lowly public servant. I can’t tell you what to do or how to do it or what to do.” He said, “Yes, you can.” He said, “Don’t come back in this office again until you can tell me which ones I should select.” Off I went, tail between my legs, went and saw secretary of department. He said, “I don’t know what to say to you, but you work it out, and if it works, if it doesn’t, you’ll get sacked.”
Actually, it forced me to think really strategically about it. I suppose because I grew up with a pretty strong Christian value system, to me it’s about how do I help the people of Australia? I was looking at these projects going, “What’s going to have the best benefit for the people of Australia?”
On that basis, I was able to go through and say there were five. I could knock three out and say, “These two are fantastic.” I went back to Walsh and he said to me, “Good. Now you’re learning. From now on, don’t come back in here again until you can tell me which ones to go with.”
I confirmed those two and away he went and the two of them came to fruition. I’ve had that experience of being pushed to make those decisions, and then being able today on the work I’ve been for the last 25 years. You’ve got to stand up, you’ve got to be counted, and you’ve got to be brave enough to stand in front of people who turn their chair away from you and look at the wall while you’re presenting to them. You use words like fuck, and then they turn around and look at you.

Anthony Denman:
Is that what you do?

Mark Seymour:
That’s a fairly good a story.

Anthony Denman:
I should try that. I should try that. I’ll probably do it anyway without really thinking about it

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. Well, I didn’t swear much in those days, but that taught me different lessons.

Anthony Denman:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from property marketing, it’s how to swear.

Mark Seymour:
It is. Yeah.

Anthony Denman:
Drink heavily.

Mark Seymour:
Yes. Drink heavily.

Anthony Denman:
No. I was good at that before I started property marketing. Actually

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. I think it was a prerequisite coming into it. Look, it’s been a great journey from that. Just thinking about some of the stuff from my childhood. I think I told you the story about the North Melbourne scout who came to see me when I was playing at Ainslie as a 16 year old.
He said to me, “I’m really interested in you.” I said, I’m not the best footballer in the team.” He said, “Maybe not.” But he said, “You’re the best strategic thinker in the team.” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “I’ve been watching you. This is your third game I’ve watched you play.”
He said, “You’re at fullback. It’s AFL, so you’re at fullback and you’re marshaling your troops. You’re making sure your corners are cut off and this is happening. You’re pushing players around and you’re actually thinking and determining where the ball is going to go to.”
He said, “It’s rare and it’s something that can’t be taught.” He said, “I don’t know where you got it from, but you got it.” He said, “I can teach you the rest.” That was just, wow, incredible. I just walked away from that thinking, “Is he really talking to me?” Just thinking about today, I’m just thinking back through my life, and that was probably the first time someone had said something to me in that vein, but also it was a really positive thing to say.
I had a negative old man. Everything was negative. It was really nice to have someone positively come up to you and say, “Hey, you’re good at that.” That really propped me up and I think got me started in thinking there’s more to life than just ABCD. I started out doing accounting at uni in Canberra, and then I ended up doing economics at ANU as a bachelor degree.
It was really the big thinking that really got me going. I love the big thinking. I love the big picture concept. That’s why one of the reasons why during COVID I couldn’t get any work, because I want to go on site. I want to go and see what’s there. I go and sit in coffee shops probably like you do in the local area and I watch people.
Watch what cars they drive. I watch what they eat, what they drink, what clothes they wear, what’s going on around. To me, motivations of people within that strategic phase are probably the most important thing. You get a very deep insight into their motivations to actually purchase.
What’s going on here? Are some of them just cheap following? They want to buy a house. This is a cheap product. They come out here and buy the cheap product. Others are making a more strategic decision. This is a place I’d like to live for the next 30, 40 years, but to do that, I need things around me. I don’t want to travel forever to get to them.
That prompts me to think of all these big projects in a completely different manner, and also the smaller ones as well. We had a project in Shanghai called Lewa Gardens, and it was a place that really needed some really heavy strategic thinking about how do you get expatriates to go and live in this place?
It was just about 10 minutes south of Hongqiao airport, which is one of the biggest airports in the world, which is in the south of Shanghai, about 10 Ks off the bun. It was where I sat one day walking through these huge mansions being built. Why will people pay 1,000 bucks a week or 10,000 bucks a week? I can’t remember what it was now. A lot of money to be there.
There’s some nice shops up the road and a few other things, but one of things that came that we had this big clubhouse, and that could be the be all and end all for these people, especially for what they call this lovely term the trailing spouse. The trailing spouse is generally a woman is sitting at home with her children, taking them to school, bring them back, and there’s not a lot to do, especially in a country where you maybe not be able to speak the language.

Anthony Denman:
I tell you what. There’s no way in the world I’m calling my missus a trailing spouse.

Mark Seymour:
It’s lovely, too, isn’t it? It’s shocker.

Anthony Denman:
That’s one way to end up sleeping with one eye open if I was doing that.

Mark Seymour:
Oh, I think so. I think so. Justine wouldn’t put up with that one, nor would I ever use it, but it’s used in the terminology within the industry in the relocation industry. But it’s where I sat down one day and I thought, “Can we do it here? Can we put a health clinic in here, a dental clinic in here? Can we do a hairdresser? Can we do a coffee shop and a restaurant of [ingood note Can we put a creation here?”
I spoke to people in Singapore and spoke to all these different people trying to bring these people together to create a product that everyone would want, and that’s why I talk about investment attraction. I wanted something that was so attractive that people go, “I’m going there. I’m going. That’s worth the 10,000.”
That’s that value concept. If I go there and pay that 10,000, I get all that. People across the road don’t have it. The two or three compounds around where we were, they didn’t have any of that. They just had this big clubhouse with a big Chinese restaurant in it, and that was it.
But we could do specialised things in there, even to the point we even spoke to Hilton to put in accommodation on the top floors, and that could be used as a short-term thing so people could go into the homes once the homes were ready to move into. Also, if they had relatives coming over, relatives could stay in this hotel.
It was just planning that whole process and thoughts of what actually goes on in people’s lives, and how do you then meet that from a property perspective. I’ve heard so many developers, “That’s all I want. That’s all I want.” “Who told you that?” “Oh, an architect told me or a real estate agent told me.”
The reasons behind that, people can think a bit more deeply about this and actually study people and look at what they’re doing, and I think that’s the thing that drives me. I love this human behaviour and psychology behind it. Why are people doing what they’re doing, and can you meet their needs? If you can meet their needs, you’re going a long way to creating a concept of value for them.
I think that’s where once you create that concept of value, then you’re actually starting to get in a position where you can start to drive your price structure and try and get that profit off the back of that. There’s actually a fairly simple concept through to profit, but you’ve got to get that first part right. It’s a bit like foundations for a building. If you don’t do it right, you don’t get it.

Anthony Denman:
You’ve done all this really deep strategic work around positioning and outcomes, and you’ve created a vision for the master plan. Individual lots are then sold off to individual developers who then come along and want to completely derail everything that you’ve done to that point. How do you handle that?

Mark Seymour:
There’s been a few Barneys. I’ve had things thrown at me. This and that.

Anthony Denman:
What’s the most dangerous thing you had thrown at you?

Mark Seymour:
Chair.

Anthony Denman:
A chair. Really?

Mark Seymour:
With the words, “You’re not fucking listening to me.” By then, I was at a point where I actually thought at that point. It didn’t matter. He had his opinion. He apologised, by the way. He apologized.

Anthony Denman:
Oh, good. Good. Good. I had a mobile phone thrown it at me once.

Mark Seymour:
Oh, did you?

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. But that was nothing like a chair.

Mark Seymour:
Going back to talking about the NBA before, is it Lee Iacocca who made the famous comment that business is all about relationships? Absolutely, that’s the thing you learn, I think, as you goes through business and just get older. How important the relationships are not only to get work and keep the work, but also in selling the concept of what you’re doing.
I learned over time. The guy who turned his chair on me and looked the other way while I presented. I learned over time that if I can’t capture the minds of the actual client, I’m going nowhere. I’ve learned to mitigate my drive to say this is the only way to actually driving it through that process first. I learned this at Victoria Park with the other developers coming in. They did. They all wanted to go down a different road and they brought blokes like you in, and you’d all go, “Oh, we’re doing this and we’re doing this.”

Anthony Denman:
I was just following instructions.

Mark Seymour:
Then I’d come and sit down with you and go, “Hey, mate. We’re not doing that.” You go, “Yes, we are.” Seriously things thrown at me.

Anthony Denman:
Water pistols.

Mark Seymour:
Water pistols.
I wonder who did that.

Anthony Denman:
I swear to God, I don’t remember.

Mark Seymour:
You don’t remember that.
It was one of Justin Hemm’s places over there in Potts Point over there across the roak from where you worked.

Anthony Denman:
Was it ?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. It was the Italian one.

Anthony Denman:
That was a wild time. Oh, Fratelli Paradiso

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. Fratelli.

Anthony Denman:
Oh, was it there? Did I pull a water pistol on you at Fratelli’s. Jesus. They were the days. Let me tell you, for those people, prospective clients listening, I’m no longer like that.

Mark Seymour:
Well, I can confirm you’ve moved on.

Anthony Denman:
Thank you. Thank you.

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. I learned that battering through didn’t achieve anything, so I had to really temper my way and become a better salesperson at what I was doing, because I wasn’t selling it properly. I was just going, “There’s only one way. It’s my way. You either follow or we’re all stuffed.”
Then I learned there were 20 different ways you could do it. How do you then make your concept viable to the other people’s perspectives and then eventually get them over the road? Then I learned to do that. That was a language issue. It was a positioning of the actual presentation and the things you were saying.
It was trying to find their hot points, both their pain points, but also the positive side, and trying to find a way to say to them, “This is what it’s going to achieve for you.” I suppose that’s something you don’t learn in that MBA. You learn that in the field. You get it in the field.
When you have people coming at you and angry with you because you’re opposing what they’re trying to do, you actually have to find a way through that process. Otherwise, your business falls apart. 25 years, obviously it hasn’t. I’ve learned a way of doing it, learned a way of understanding it.
One of the things I do now, which annoys some developers, is I listen. I sit and I listen. I listen to them. I listen to all their minions around them. I talk to and listen to their consultants, their architects. I go and listen to the people who might buy. From there I listened first to understand, because I realised in those early days, I really wasn’t understanding. I was just coming up with ideas.
Once I got across that barrier, my work became much better, and then I really started to get into a position where I could really maneuver. The Hermitage at Camden is a classic one. Sekisui House. It was maneuvering the product so that it was above Oran Park and above the other developments around it, and it would command a slightly higher premium.
But they had to do some work to get there, and to do that work to get there, well, it meant they actually had to spend some money on it. They had to think about their strategic plan. We went through multiple variations of that plan to get to a point where, “Yes. That would work there and that would work there. Now let’s test some of it.”
I suppose that’s the difference. For Victoria Park, I was on Victoria Park for 10 years for Landcom. The Hermitage, I was on that for four or five years for Sekisui. You learn over that period of time, you have the space and the time in which you can help that. That’s why when I first went to Prince Henry, it was at an old hospital with grass going everywhere.
Jeff Joyce stood there with me. He said, “You got to market this, mate. How are you going to do it?” I looked at it and thought, “There’s a jail 500 meters up the road, and it’s not a particularly nice area, but there’s an absolutely stunning beach with three golf courses running past it. How do I bring that to the people of New South Wales and Australia?”
That’s what struck me about how do you make that happen? How do I sell that to Landcom? How do I sell that to Stockland? How do I sell it to any other developer who comes into that area? There were four or five in the end, including a large retirement home at the top of the site.
Selling that vision to people became my goal then. Once I had it agreed by the client, then I had to sell it to these other developers, and to their credit, most of them came on board other than the guy that threw the chair at me. Other than that. One of the other projects I worked on for a short time was Greater Springfield with Maha Sinnathamber.
He was just incredible to listen to. The vision that man had for that project, for creating basically a city. He stood there and he said, “I was stood on top of that hill. It was 2,500 hectares of land with trees all over it. How am I going to make this work?” Listening to him was very similar to what I was thinking and how I was approaching it and thinking through how does this work over this 20, 30 year period.
Now, that’s not the same as working on a 250 dwelling apartment block. Today’s world, of course, that could take five, six, seven years to get out of the ground and totally minted and profit in the bank. There is some element to that, and I do enjoy therefore being at the forefront of that.
When that is like with Jeff Joyce standing at Prince Henry, it’s just grass and old buildings, and that gives you the opportunity to say, “What could possibly happen here? How could we make this work? Why will people find value in living here?” I’d say that’s the difference between how I see the concept of placemaking. I don’t see myself as a placemaker. I see myself as a strategic marketer trying to drive value for people to be attracted to come and be at a place. I hope that makes sense. I know I’m going around this.

Anthony Denman:
No. It’s good. You do a lot of qualitative stuff or is it all quantitative?

Mark Seymour:
A lot of qual.

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. What does that look like?

Mark Seymour:
It’s really trying to get into a deep dive into motivations and asking questions similar to what we’ve just been discussing. What do you see about living in a place? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in this place in 10 years time? Do you want to be here in 20 years time? Do you want your children to grow up here? What would you see your children doing there?
Asking questions that property developers don’t normally ask. The one at South Berkeley with the Shepard brothers, they were basically becoming a quasi council in some respects. I was talking to them about bringing in product that normally a council would try and drive through the place or a state government. But they’re going to have to do it themselves, and then it was really sitting down saying, “How do we do that? Well, let’s go and talk to these guys. Let’s go and talk to these guys.”

Anthony Denman:
Do you get them in groups or do you do them individually?

Mark Seymour:
No. Group. Generally do groups.

Anthony Denman:
You do. Have you ever done individuals?

Mark Seymour:
Yes. I had a long history because of government. You do a lot of research in government. I’ve been through a lot of research programs with government product, both in concepting them, but also in presenting ideas and alternatives and sitting with focus groups and individuals and going through a process of trying to understand what they thought about what you were saying and where you were going.
Then looking at those results, going through those results and saying, “What can I use and what can’t I use? What’s impactful? Where’s that beautiful piece of fine grain that will give me an inkling of differentiation? How do I build that? How can I get that out of there and bring that into what I’m saying over here?”
I’m looking for those things. It’s fairly generic. It’s from market research. You get a generic, say 60%, 70% of answers, you could probably answer them yourself. But above that, in that top 30%, there’s always a gem, and I’m looking for that gem. I suppose that’s the one thing that was said to me over the years. If you don’t add value, then get out.
I always have this thing in the back of my head. If I’m not adding value, I’m gone. Add value. Find the way to add value that no one else is doing in the market. It’s a process of continuous improvement, constantly looking for the next space. We get through a project and I’ll be going, “What’s next? What’s going to happen next?”
I start reading all these books about future strategies and future things and stuff like that. That’s right. No, that won’t work. Is the market really moving in that direction? Is it moving in this direction? Are we just looking at fads? Are fads really worth following? How do you appeal to a fad as it comes through, or do you appeal to it, considering the majority of buyers probably won’t go anywhere near the fad?
Then managing expectations of the developer who’s looking at those fads and things like that. How do you manage that process as well? I spend a lot of time in that management process, and I see that as the sell come up with these ideas. You’ve got to sell them in. You’ve got to get people to support.
The other thing you learned was even talking to a developer, he’s got to go and talk to a funder. We have a project in Auckland called Kahawai Point, which is on the base of Manukau Harbour. It’s probably the most beautiful development I’ve ever worked on. It’s got two big rivers running past. It’s a beautiful place.
But everything I do has to go to the funder to present to the funder about why we should actually go down this road. I’ve presented a few times to them, and I have to understand my developer has to go and get their approval to get the money, so he has a boss as well. I think you have to understand that process as well. It’s not just the developer. He’s got to go and get somebody to fund this with whoever that might be. I suppose it’s learning that it doesn’t just stop there. It’s over here as well. How do you appeal to those guys?

Anthony Denman:
Are you an avid reader?

Mark Seymour:
Yes, I am.

Anthony Denman:
You are. Okay. What sort of books do you read?

Mark Seymour:
That’s interesting. I used to be all about autobiographies. I suffer that I can’t really read fiction too much, because I don’t believe it. I recommend reading the 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma.

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. The 5 AM Club. It’s very foreign to me, but just like it.

Mark Seymour:
There’s a lot of structure in there, too. He puts a lot of structure into how to do different things in your life, in your day-to-day stuff. It’s not just about getting up at 5:00 AM. It’s beautifully written. It’s a sort of book, I found it really hard to put down.
But recently, the last couple of years I got into reading about stoics and reading all that sort of process. I think that appealed to me, because I really didn’t know much about it until I read Sharma, and then I started to read that. I’m very based around reality and also values. I’m very big about value systems.
How do you get your values right? Don’t play with those values, because when I was younger I did and it didn’t come out too well. I’ve gone back to being more value based in what I’m doing and the way I live my life. I tend to be focused on reading things like that.
I do a lot of work with Stephen Alban, who you know, and Stephen is a massive reader. He’ll say, “Read this book.” There’s a book called Sapiens I’ve got upstairs I haven’t read yet. And it’s about the history of mankind. It’s this big thick book. I sit on the beach at Christmas time trying to read this, and all the other blokes are all reading fiction.
I’m motivated by understanding motivations. I think that’s one of the big things. What motivates you to do what you do? Why are you in this game? When you hear stories about people say, “I’m just here for the money.” In some situation, I understand. Of course, you are, but there’s something else driving people to do it. I suppose Simon Sinek’s stuff about why comes into that as well. Why are you here? What are you doing? It is important to understand the why, and I call it the motivation.

Anthony Denman:
Deanna Lane opened my mind to all that stuff.

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. A big reality reader, I suppose, is the way to put it.

Anthony Denman:
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Have you ever read that book?

Mark Seymour:
No, I haven’t.

Anthony Denman:
That’s a good book. You’d enjoy that. It’s about how your mind plays tricks on you to prevent you from completing or even beginning actually the creative process. Things like for me, I’ll find anything other than getting started to do. Oh, shit. I’ll sit down and I’ll be ready to write something, and I’ll look over and I’ll see a leaf floating in the pool and I’ll think, “I just better get rid of that.”
You know what I mean? It’s very good at preventing your creative being from being, which I understand a little bit about another book, which is a similar title, but somewhat different, which is the Art of War by Mr. Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu. I’ve heard a lot about it, but I know pretty much nothing about it.

Mark Seymour:
It’s pretty complex.

Anthony Denman:
I bet it is.

Mark Seymour:
In a funny way it’s scary. At Bond, we read von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and a few other things. Strategy was originally very war based and goes back for centuries, and understanding that.

Anthony Denman:
Well, why is that?

Mark Seymour:
They had to develop different ways to counter different armies coming at you, and how did you defeat them?

Anthony Denman:
Why in these teachings did they lean so heavily on? I guess it’s because it’s life or death. The consequences are pretty dire.

Mark Seymour:
When I think from my first reading of Michael Porter and these guys, and Tom Peters, when that all came out in the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s, they had to lean back on original military strategies, because there wasn’t much else written about it. Civil wars and second, first world war, and even going back to prehistoric times in a sense.
They had to fall back on something, and they found in that a really strong written, recorded understanding of maneuvering. How do you outflank an army? I don’t know if Sun Tzu’s story, I’ll get this mixed up, but this army marching through this valley. He’s under manned by 10,000 to one, and his main part of his army stands at the front gate of this valley.
The big army approaching him looks at him and goes, “We’re going to take you.” What they don’t see is they’re out flanked either side by the rest of his army, and they come down and they kill him. Now, that sort of thinking, I think it became popular during the ’80s and the ’90s. How do you apply that? ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.
How do you apply that to private enterprise? You apply that to the maneuvering of companies in a competitive environment. Prior to the ’50s, it probably wasn’t as strong, but ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, the competition that we had to face was quite remarkable. Globalisation came in, which created even more competition.
I think they went back historically on those military strategies to say, “These are ways that you can actually think. Can you apply this into a corporation’s situation or a business situation?” That was part of the work we were doing, which was to take aside those strategies and say, “How would you apply this to it?”
One of Sun Tzu’s great comments is where he talks about you win a war by not starting a war. Don’t compete if you don’t have to. He probably developed this over a number of years, but the in-depth thinking that they put into it, it was all based on what he’d witnessed and what he’d heard, and then his own thinking and his own cultural focus on it.
It’s just an incredible book from that perspective. Hard to translate, but there are elements in it that you can take out of it and go, “Hey, that might work over there.” I’ve used that one a few times. Don’t start a war if you don’t have to. One of his other ones is do not fight a competitor who’s much bigger than you.
Outflank him. Find another way around it. Instead of going headlong onto it and trying to attack them, find a way to go around that competitor. When I go through and do that initial competitive analysis I do, I look at all the local developments, who the developers are, and I look for where their weaknesses are. Where’s a weakness in that project?
Sometimes I read it through and I go, “There’s nothing there.” Then you go a bit deeper and go, “Ah, look at that. That’s something I could use there.” You don’t use it as a direct hit on them. You use it as part of a process of putting a positive spin on what you’re doing, because you know they don’t have it.
That’s the application of those sort of concepts into an everyday development project or any other. When working on corporates and we’re repositioning a corporate, it’s the same thing. How do they play? What are their unique selling propositions or their sustainable competitive advantages? What’s sustainable about that advantage? Does someone else have that, and to what degree do they have it?
It’s about maneuvering those things around. Not just using marketing. Sometimes it’s about the price or the product, trying to get the product right. Or when you go back into the investment attraction and you say, “Let’s put a university in there.” Well, shit. No one else has got a university. That’ll work. It’s about finding a way to make those sorts of things happen for projects.

Anthony Denman:
I think what we might do is we might jump from here into Michael Porter is another author.

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. He’s a professor at Harvard or one of those places.

Anthony Denman:
The question is why is Michael Porter’s five forces theory so important in understanding the main competitive forces?

Mark Seymour:
One of the things, especially on, say the project out of Camden, we did a five forces analysis on that. It’s really a tool to use to understand and to make you think about what’s going on around you. The five elements are competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitution, and threat of new entry.
One of the things about Porter was the ability to look at the industry today. Supplier power is enormous. From a workforce perspective, it’s extremely expensive, thanks to a number of different issues. Then there’s a lack of resources, so that creates a very strong skew towards supplier power.
A lot of developments can’t start because of the cost. A lot of developments can’t start because they can’t get the resources involved in it. When you do this type of analysis, you go through and you look at your competition, you’ll get supplier power. In some situations back in, say the 2000s, supplier power wasn’t that strong, but today you’d say it’s really at the top of the game.
Buyer power is stronger at different points in the cycle as well. I’ve been through about, probably like you, probably about four or five cycles, and at different points the buyer power is much stronger. You get investors coming in. You get those days when people used to line up at the front of the Mirvac developments and these developments to try and buy a product.
That really heavy buyer process, but even then they didn’t have a lot of power at that point. That power resided with the owner. Threat of substitution. Why will people, when they’re coming to your development, will they look down the road and go, “Well, I’ll go down there, because for whatever reason they’ve got something which is more attractive.”
You look at that substitution. What will happen if they substitute something for something else? Then threat of new entry is the things that you’re doing. Is there a possibility that a new entrant can come in that local area and then come against you, fight against you? That goes on all the time.
But at least in our industry, there’s a lot of barriers against that because of the time and the cost and everything else that goes with it. But it can be times where you have multiple different developments going on around you, and that happened in Victoria Park. When we took that on and started developing that up, at one point we had 15 developments around us competing with everything we had at that project.
That was probably maybe five or six years in. In that first five years we’re in an industrial zone. We were the only ones there, and we therefore had all the power to make that work. You can apply that just as a model, if you like, to consider different elements to go with a project.
It elicits a number of different things that come out of it to help you develop up a strategic direction off the back of it. You take those elements out of it and say, “That’s important. That’s not. This is more important over here. Now, how can I develop a strategic direction off the back?”
That’s the key facet of what he was teaching at Harvard. Five forces became a very popular model to use, and there are a number of different other ones around, but this was one that really appealed to me coming out of that process that I was involved in.
It just gave structure to it. You know what I mean? It gave some certainty that you were going down a road that you really thought through, because one of the worst things, and I think you probably see it yourself in this industry, is a lot of fly by the seat of your pants stuff goes on.

Anthony Denman:
It sure does.

Mark Seymour:
I’ve heard things said. “Let’s do that.” “Where did that come from?” “Johnny said that’s going to work.” Who’s Johnny?” “Oh, some bloke. “Seriously? You’re going to bet your entire development on something that some bloke over there said to you?” The answer is a lot of times yes, they will do that.
If you look at the integrity of the industry, the bigger institutionalised players and some of the second tier guys off that, like Mike Sheargold, they’re really careful and deliberate in how they go about doing their work. It’s not fly by the seat of your pants stuff.
It’s really carefully assessed. They go through these processes and they come out the other end with, “This is what we’re going to do.” Whereas some of the other stuff I’ve seen, just like you, isn’t like that. They wonder why the industry has a bad name, because there’s some men and women in that area create havoc.
I’m on the marketing awards as one of the judges, and I focus on trying to raise the bar of the marketing into a strategic level so that when you go through that process and you come to that point, the industry is better off overall. It’s not just that project. You’re trying to lift the industry up, because the industry needs that.
The industry needs to get out of being that bottom feeder in terms of some of those, we’ll call them cowboys, and moving into that space where people believe in it and trust in it and it creates some genuineness to what they’re doing, because the industry, the real players carefully think it through. That’s the bend I work on.

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. Really interesting. Let’s talk about storytelling then, shall we? How can storytelling be used to enhance the value of property?

Mark Seymour:
That horrible word narrative.

Anthony Denman:
Doesn’t that get overused a bit?

Mark Seymour:
That’s kind of flogged, isn’t it? Sorry. Just to finish off on that five forces. A lot of that is in risk management, too. You’re trying to manage a number of risks around you, because you’re actually exposing those risks, and because you come at it from a marketing perspective and a buyer perspective, you’re actually saying things to a developer they probably may not have even thought of.
I know a number of people in the real estate industry don’t think of those things either, and that’s not their fault. It’s just the way they go about what they do. I think it’s incumbent upon us to be able to say to people, “Have you thought about this? There’s a real risk there.” Then that plays into your profitability and how you manage your costs and how you focus on your partnerships and things like that. That’s important, but going back to your next subject.

Anthony Denman:
Storytelling. Narrative.

Mark Seymour:
It’s become more important as time has gone on to me. In the initial phases, it was more about getting the advertising byline right and trying to appeal for that big hit on that byline. But now, especially with the invention of social media, it’s created a position where you can tell a lot of stories.
But once again, it comes back to what my mate said to me that if you don’t have an overriding strategy, you have multiple stories going all over the bloody place. As you know, consistency is everything in what you’re selling to the market. If your stories start to deviate often in different directions, people start to go, “What do these guys stand for? What do they actually mean?”
You have to be able to tell the story as part of your brand infrastructure, if you like, which is a consistent approach to your positioning. Those stories have to constantly do that. For example, we’re working on a not-for-profit at the moment called the Animal Welfare League of New South Wales.
We’ve just gone through a couple of years with them, but we now got a new brand statement, and that’s what we’re going to prosecute on. That’s where we’re going to be. Every time we mention something, this is the area we’re going to come from. We’re going to use these words.
We’re going to say to the market, “That’s us in the marketplace.” The point is to differentiate you in the market constantly by appealing and telling the story. We actually have really wonderful heartfelt stories in there about animals and what’s happened to them, where they’ve gone, and what people think of them.

Anthony Denman:
Why did you decide to get involved in that?

Mark Seymour:
Well, Steve Albin is out there as well, and we did that as a pivot while property went into the doldrums.

Anthony Denman:
It’s not because you have a personal motivation behind that animal welfare?

Mark Seymour:
I love dogs. I love dogs and I’ve worked in a couple associations and things like that. I’ve always done a little bit of not-for-profit work, and when this came along, it’s proved to be one of the most complex businesses I’ve ever worked on.

Anthony Denman:
Really?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. Because you’re actually working. Really interesting from a marketing perspective is you’re working in a non-tangible. I’m trying to appeal to you to say, “Give me $20.” You’re looking at me going, ” Why? There’s 25,000 animal rescues in Australia. Why should I give you 20 bucks?”

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. There’s a lot.

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. That comes back to the same thing, investment attraction. How do we make this product so good? It’s mainly all through storytelling. How do we make the product so good that people go, “I’ve got to give to that?” In looking at where they were and where we are today, we’re now profitable today. I’m not allowed to use that word. We’re in surplus today.
In looking at it where it is today, we moved from the severity element of it. I remember back when we were kids and used to see the kids from Ethiopia with their swollen tummies and that vision stuff that went on for a long time. If you follow the case on that, their money started to fall away, because people felt they couldn’t resolve the problem.
What’s the point in me giving you $20, because it’s actually not going to resolve it. They’ve now moved to things like showing children in school or at university or in jobs, and then people go, “Ah, it works.” We did with animals. Instead of showing them in cages with half a leg missing or something like that, where we now show them in their homes with their new owners.
That’s what your money does. Your money helps get that animal through our quality process and takes it out into a beautiful home where they’re adopted and they’re loved and they’re cared for. That is a story that people are now coming to us for and going, “Well, I can see how this now works.”
You can’t see it work when the animal is in a cage and it’s in dire straits. It might appeal to you emotionally, heavily emotionally, but it doesn’t really appeal to people saying, “How can I fix this?” People want to fix things. People want to solve cancer. They want to solve these issues, and so people will give you money to solve those issues.

Anthony Denman:
What about solving the housing crisis?

Mark Seymour:
Well, as we know, it’s a very opinionated industry and there’s a lot of people involved in it, and especially at a government level, there’s a number of opinions about what could solve it. That’s from things such as actually working on the tax regime, for example. Working on the inputs that are going in, especially in New South Wales that are impacting upon the taxes on a block of land.
I heard the other day, 45%, 50%. I could be completely wrong there. Anyone listening to this probably is going, “No. That’s bullshit, Mark.” But if that’s the case, if that is really the case, then the government needs to step back and have a really good hard look at that, because that is driving prices in a direction which is just completely unaffordable.
It’s almost like that rape and pillage method of just keep getting more and more money out of it, and you get to a point where it’s now caused a massive problem. But how do you now fix that problem without hurting the valuations of other homes of other people that bought, say in an area?
They’ve paid $1.5 million and you actually attempt to restructure some of those tax issues and the prices could fall, so what does that do to the person’s valuation over here who paid the 1.4. It is a multi-complex problem, but I think it needs a directional statement in terms of taking a position on it and driving that position.
We’ve seen multiple different things happen. The New Zealand government, for example, last week have just brought in a new thing where they’re trying to prop up developments by underwriting project sales, which is really interesting. But reading the papers in depth the other day, they’ve now retracted a little bit and going, “We hope we don’t have to spend any money here. We hope we all get out on the ground really.”
It’s a bit like, I worked on MBA films back in the ’80s, and we were giving out 175% tax deduction. The money just poured into Australian film. That’s where Crocodile Dundee and all of these films came from. Eventually tax got hold of it. ATO, the treasury got hold of it and went, “We’re not doing that anymore. We’re just losing money hand over fist.”
The profitability coming off the back of those films is not strong enough to make that money back. We kickstarted the industry and they dropped it from 175 to 150 down to 100, and that actually got a few of these things done at the time. But at the end of the day, it’s unsustainable, and I think that’s part of the problem with the industry.
When you start putting in first time earner grants or you start trying to cap prices, or you start doing things like that with some mechanisms to try and solve the affordability issue, you’re creating another problem where a developer might grab that and goI’ll bung that straight into the price and your price just keeps inflating. What mechanism? Maybe it is the tax regime.
What mechanism can you put in place that is actually going to allow you to have those prices either stagnate so you stop this inflation process? Or if they fall a little bit as they naturally do at the moment. There’s some falling going on at the moment. If you can find a fall that goes into that and you can actually structure some of that fall, you may be able to find a way to get people back into that market.
But then you got to look at home loans. What percentage are you going to apply to a home loan? In my dad’s day when he moved to Canberra and the government gave him a 3% loan forever, for life. We lived in a small government house and he was able to buy that 10 years later on 3%. That was for life. Are there ways to look at things like that? I don’t know. It’s a multifaceted problem and there’s brighter people than me around that can solve it, but it’s the one thing at the moment we’ve come to a bit of a standstill, I think.

Anthony Denman:
Yeah. No. I’ve never seen the category in worse shape in my 30 years here.

Mark Seymour:
Short ditched efforts aren’t going to fix it. Maybe it comes back to a thing we’re talking about, strategic thinking. Really stepping back and not looking at it from a political point of view, but looking at it from a full structural point of view and then saying, “If you do this, what happens to that? What happens to that? What happens to that?” Then finding a way to make that happen.

Anthony Denman:
There’s a brief for you, mate.

Mark Seymour:
There is. It’s a good brief.

Anthony Denman:
Keep you busy for some time

Mark Seymour:
Love to be part of that. Love to be part of that one.

Anthony Denman:
Mark, this has been amazing. We’ve been going for some time. If you don’t mind, I’ve got a few little questions for you to finish, and they’re not easy.

Mark Seymour:
Nothing easy in my game, mate.

Anthony Denman:
Not an easy question. What is the legacy that you would like to be remembered for by future generations?

Mark Seymour:
Within the industry, without being too up yourself, being a person who pushed the benchmark for the level of quality that went into the marketing of property development. I’d like to be that person who didn’t step back, who wanted to see the best for the industry from an altruistic perspective, because I love this industry.
I’ve loved it from the first day that we went into that ADI Jackson’s Landing project with Lendlease. It was just wow. We were doing something real, something constructive. We were giving people homes. We were actually developing. I’ve always been, “Wow. This is amazing.”
To be a person who saw that and has been through nearly 20 years of that, over 20 years of that. If people could say, “Yeah. He really tried to lift the concept of marketing. He wanted it to be at a higher level so that it wasn’t just put to an aside or an afterthought.”
It was an integral part of setting a process or a decision making process, which created a position in the market, which then developed your project to a certain point. I’m very much about quality, I suppose, is what I’d like to be known as. Someone who wanted quality in everything they did and probably didn’t take too many steps backwards to compromise that quality.

Anthony Denman:
Thank you. I for one am very grateful that we’ve got people like you in our industry who are championing the cause of what we do.

Mark Seymour:
Thank you.

Anthony Denman:
That’s fabulous. How many children do you have?

Mark Seymour:
Five. Five.

Anthony Denman:
Five kids. That’s right. Five kids. Three wives or something?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. We won’t talk about that, except I’ve been married to Justine now for 25 years.

Anthony Denman:
You finally found the one.

Mark Seymour:
I finally found the right one. Third time lucky.

Anthony Denman:
[inaudible 01:10:41]-

Mark Seymour:
5 kids. Liam is 36. He’s in New York. He’s a creative director, advertising agency in New York.

Anthony Denman:
No way.

Mark Seymour:
At Publicis Health.

Anthony Denman:
No way. That’s crazy.

Mark Seymour:
My daughter Maddie in Canberra, and she looks after children due to domestic violence. She’s a officer. She’s got two little children, Flossie and Bobby, who are my first grandchildren. That’s lovely. Then Bronte, who’s 30, and she lives here in Melbourne, and she’s an optometrist.
Jack has just finished university, did a combined finance and commerce degree, and he’s on the pathway to being an AFL umpire. Very good. Then Dallas is our youngest. He’s 18. He’s doing commerce at Melbourne, and very confident. One of the heads of the commerce society. He’s full of life and energy and happiness and all of them are healthy and all of them are happy, and that’s probably the greatest gift I’ve ever given the world.

Anthony Denman:
Congratulations, man. That’s an amazing story to hear they’re all doing so well and making a real difference to the way the world behaves in a positive way, which is great. If you had to just offer them one simple life lesson that you’d leave them with, what would it be?

Mark Seymour:
Yeah. This is a subject of discussion down the beach last week with Justine, trying to think about what that is. One of the things that my grandfather said to me, and he 1897, grew up on the farm. He had a stock and station agency in a little place near Corawa, and he lost everything during the first world war.
Then basically, had a pretty ordinary life after that. Got married and had kids and everything, but he basically had a pretty ordinary life. But he said to me, “As my grandchild, I’ll pass onto you, never ever give up. Never give up.” He said persistence, determination, and being consistent in what you’re doing can’t be beaten.”

Anthony Denman:
I love that. That’s unreal. Thank you so much. I really appreciate, mate. You’ve really given this a lot of thought and I’m very appreciative of that and very appreciative of the amount of thought and passion and dedication that goes into our category. Thank you and thank you for being a guest on the show. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Mark Seymour:
Phone number is easiest. 0411-393-393. My email address is a bit long, but it’s Mark_Seymour@SeymourStrategist.com.au, but that’s on the website if you want to look at SeymourStrategist.com.

Anthony Denman:
.com or .com.au?

Mark Seymour:
Oh, it’s both. Either one.

Anthony Denman:
I guess you’re probably on LinkedIn, too, right?

Mark Seymour:
On, LinkedIn. Indeed I am with a couple of people there. But can I just say, I was very excited about being on this and absolute privilege to do it. My wife said to me the other day at Anglers down at Lorne having a beer. There’s not too many people get this opportunity to talk about their lives and their thinking. She said, “This is a real honour. Make the most of it.”

Anthony Denman:
You have done 100%.

Mark Seymour:
Really appreciate it.

Anthony Denman:
Thanks, Mark.