Who Will Own Australia?

I have spent most of my career around property.

I grew up in the UK before moving to Australia in 2001. Two years later I returned to London, where I worked through one of the biggest structural changes in commercial property before moving back to Australia in 2013.

At the time, the conversation wasn’t about housing.

It was about institutional ownership.

The UK was introducing REITs, a structure designed to attract long-term capital into commercial real estate. I was working at Ernst & Young and later joined Land Securities, one of Britain’s largest listed property companies, as that transformation unfolded.

The debate was largely about office buildings, shopping centres and industrial property.

Very few people imagined that, one day, a similar conversation would emerge around housing.

Yet here we are.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something.

The language has changed.

We no longer talk only about first-home buyers, investors and homeowners.

We talk about Build-to-Rent.

Institutional capital.

Housing funds.

Managed investment trusts.

Superannuation investment.

Global pension funds.

Australia needs that capital.

There is little point pretending otherwise.

We have a significant housing shortage, construction costs remain high and many developments simply don’t proceed without access to large pools of long-term funding.

Institutional investors can help solve that problem.

But I can’t help wondering whether we’re becoming so focused on how we build more homes that we’ve stopped asking who will own them.

Every housing debate seems to end with the same conclusion.

We need more supply.

I agree.

More homes are essential.

But housing policy and ownership policy are not necessarily the same thing.

A country can build more homes while creating fewer homeowners.

That distinction matters.

For decades, Australia’s housing system did more than provide shelter.

It provided a pathway to ownership.

Whether it was a family buying their first home or a couple investing in a rental property for retirement, ownership became one of the primary ways Australians built long-term wealth.

Not because property prices always increased.

Not because every investment succeeded.

Because ownership itself mattered.

It created stability.

It created financial resilience.

It allowed households to accumulate productive assets over time.

That has always been the principle behind my own investment philosophy.

Long-term wealth is rarely created by chasing the next opportunity.

More often, it is created by owning productive assets and giving them time to compound.

Perhaps that is why I find today’s housing debate so interesting.

We’re discussing how to finance more homes.

We’re discussing planning reform.

We’re discussing construction productivity.

We’re discussing tax settings.

All important conversations.

But ownership seems to have become a secondary consideration.

Build-to-Rent is a good example.

It has an important role to play.

Professional rental housing will increase supply, improve choice and attract capital that Australia genuinely needs.

This isn’t an argument against Build-to-Rent.

Nor is it an argument against institutional investment.

The question is simply whether we are thinking far enough ahead.

Imagine Australia twenty years from now.

We’ve built hundreds of thousands of new homes.

Institutional investors own significant residential portfolios.

Australians have access to better rental housing than ever before.

Have we succeeded?

Perhaps.

But I think another question deserves equal attention.

How many Australians still have a realistic opportunity to own those homes?

Because ownership changes everything.

It changes how households build wealth.

It changes retirement outcomes.

It changes financial security.

It changes what parents are able to pass to their children.

The more I think about Australia’s housing challenge, the more I believe it isn’t simply about supply.

It’s about balance.

We need institutional capital.

We need private investment.

We need governments that support new housing.

But we also need to preserve a system where ordinary Australians continue to have a pathway to ownership.

Otherwise we risk measuring success by the number of homes we build rather than the number of Australians who have the opportunity to own one.

Twenty years ago I watched institutional ownership reshape commercial property.

It was the right solution for that market.

Today Australia is beginning a similar conversation around residential housing.

Perhaps it will also prove to be the right solution.

But before we celebrate every new apartment that gets built, I think we should pause and ask one simple question.

In twenty years’ time, who do we want to own Australia?

Because building homes is one thing.

Building an ownership society is something entirely different.