Mark Tonge · Journal

What a 3,300-acre farm taught me about building anything

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a long stretch of my working life, alongside the development projects, I owned and ran a farm. Three thousand three hundred acres, carrying several things at once — olives and olive-oil production, sheep, and Black Angus cattle. It was not a hobby. It was a working operation, with all the weather, patience and unglamorous labour that implies.

People who know me as a developer or, more recently, as someone who arranges capital, are sometimes surprised by the farm. But it taught me more about how to build durable things than any deal ever did.

The land sets the pace, not you

The first thing a farm teaches is humility about time. You cannot rush an olive tree. You cannot argue a herd into being ready before it is ready. The seasons do not care about your plans or your impatience. You work with the pace the land sets, or you fail.

That runs against the temperament property and finance can encourage, where speed is prized. Both things are true at once: there are moments in capital where speed is everything, and there are processes — in farming, in building a business, in developing a person’s capability — that cannot be hurried without ruining them. Knowing which is which is most of the wisdom.

Multiple income streams, one piece of land

The farm carried several enterprises on the same ground, and they balanced each other. When one was down, another was usually steadier. No single line had to carry everything, and the whole was more resilient than any part.

I did not realise at the time how completely that idea would shape the rest of my working life. Development, capital, land, agriculture — these are not scattered interests. They are streams on the same ground, each understood from the inside, each making the others more resilient.

You cannot fake having done it

There is a kind of knowledge you only get by doing the thing yourself, through a full cycle, including the bad years. You can read about running cattle. You can hire people who know. But until you have carried an operation through drought and recovery, through good prices and poor ones, you do not really understand it — and the people who have can tell, immediately, whether you have.

I feel the same about every discipline I work in now. I do not take on developments I could not deliver myself, or arrange capital for situations I have not stood inside. Earned knowledge over borrowed knowledge, always. It is slower to acquire and impossible to counterfeit.

Where it leads

The farm is also why I am building toward something larger in agriculture: a way for others to invest alongside quality Australian farmland and primary production, structured properly, by someone who has worked the ground rather than only modelled it. That will move at the pace the land allows, which is rather the point.

Build slowly where slowness is required. Carry more than one crop. And never claim to know a thing you have not done. Those are farm lessons, but I have never found a better description of how to build anything that lasts.

What good developments get right before anyone sees them

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I bought into my first development at seventeen, while I was still at school. That was 1997. In the close to three decades since, I have delivered more subdivisions than I bother to count — residential estates, gated communities, townhouse projects, industrial and marine-industry subdivisions, and commercial strata conversions in Sydney and on the Gold Coast — and I have watched a great many other people’s projects from close range.

The part of a development everyone sees comes at the end: the render, the launch, the finished community with families moving in. It is the most rewarding part of the work. But it is rarely where a project is won. The developments that go well are shaped long before any of that, by a handful of quiet decisions made early. Get those right and the visible success tends to follow.

One: buy the site for what it is, not what it might become

A good development is usually secured on the day the site is bought. The price works if approvals take their ordinary course, if costs land where the feasibility expects, and if the market simply stays sensible. Land bought on those terms gives a project room to breathe, and room to breathe is what lets a team make good decisions later rather than hurried ones.

The question I ask at acquisition is a practical one: does this still work in an ordinary year, not just a great one? When the answer is yes, the upside takes care of itself.

Two: treat the approval as a process to be managed

A development approval is not a moment. It is a process, and the best projects manage it as one. They invest early in the things that build certainty — thorough diligence, sound planning advice, the right consultants, good relationships with council — and they keep their commitments in step with what has actually been approved.

Done this way, approvals become an asset rather than a hurdle. Over the years I have taken raw green-acre sites through rezonings, material change of use and registration, and repositioned existing buildings to secure the strata approvals that let them be separated and sold. Each time, the value was created as much in the patience of the process as in the approval itself.

Three: design the capital with the project, not after it

Every development meets something unexpected. The projects that handle it calmly are the ones whose funding was designed with room in it: sensible contingency, a facility with some flexibility, a lender who understands the project, and capital held in reserve.

This is the lesson that drew me toward capital itself. Financing is not something to arrange at the end. It is part of the design of a project, as much as the layout or the product, and when the two are built to fit each other, a surprise stays an ordinary event.

Four: put the effort where the value is

The work that truly moves a development forward is a short list: secure the site well, get the approval clean, structure the capital with room to breathe, and deliver the product the market actually wants. The best teams I have worked with are disciplined about that list. They stay busy on the things that matter, and they let the rest wait.

The quiet part of the work

Development has been my life’s work and I believe in it. What it has taught me is that the visible success is built in the unglamorous early decisions about price, certainty, structure and focus — made with judgement, and made early.

Thirty years in, that is still the discipline I trust most: get the foundations right, and the finished community has every chance of becoming what everyone hoped it would be.

Why good deals still can't find money — and what actually moves capital

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a particular kind of phone call I have taken many times over the years. A capable person — a developer, a business owner, a builder — has a sound project and a real problem. The numbers work. The asset is good. And yet the money has stopped moving. A bank has changed its appetite. A valuation has come back light. A facility is maturing and the lender does not want to roll it. The deal is not bad. The financing is simply stuck.

After close to thirty years of developing land and, more recently, of arranging capital for others, I have come to believe that most of these situations are not really about whether a deal is good. They are about whether the deal is legible — whether the person assessing it can see, quickly and clearly, why their capital is safe and how it gets repaid. Capital is not usually withheld because a project is weak. It is withheld because the story is unclear, the structure is wrong for the situation, or the timing has run out.

I want to set out, plainly, what I have learned about why capital moves — written for the people on both sides of that phone call.

Banks are not the whole market, and they were never meant to be

The mainstream banks occupy a narrow band of the lending world, and they have been narrowing it further for years. They are built to lend against income-producing, standard security, to borrowers who fit a template. That is a perfectly reasonable business. It is simply not the whole market.

The rest of the market — non-bank lenders, private credit funds, family offices, high-net-worth investors, development-active builders with their own capital — is large, and it is where most genuinely interesting situations are actually funded. These lenders price differently. They move faster. They will look at unusual security, regional assets, non-income-producing land, partially complete projects, and situations under time pressure that a bank would decline at the front door. The cost of that capital is higher, but the cost of a deal that never settles is total. A bank “no” is not the market’s answer. It is one institution’s answer, from the most conservative corner of the market.

Speed is a form of security

In commercial situations, the ability to move quickly is frequently the difference between a good outcome and a loss. When a facility is maturing, when a counterparty is waiting, when a vendor will not extend, certainty within days rather than months is worth a great deal — often more than a slightly finer rate achieved too late.

So the first thing I try to establish is not the perfect structure but the realistic one that can be delivered in the time available. A term sheet in forty-eight hours that completes is worth more than an ideal structure that arrives after the opportunity has closed.

Structure is the part nobody sees and everyone feels

Most of the real work in arranging capital happens before anyone signs anything. It is in how the deal is structured: senior and mezzanine layers, where equity sits, how security is held, how a shortfall is bridged, what happens to residual stock, how a distressed position is worked out rather than enforced. A well-structured transaction makes the lender’s risk visible and bounded. A poorly structured one hides the risk, which means the lender prices for the worst case — or declines.

Having sat on the developer’s side of the table for decades, I learned this on my own projects long before I arranged finance for anyone else. The structure is not paperwork. It is the thing that determines whether capital feels safe enough to move.

When existing debt is the problem

A category I now spend real time on is the situation where the existing facility has become the threat — a covenant breach, a lender exit, a maturity default, an adverse valuation, deteriorating serviceability. The instinct is often to delay and hope. In my experience that is the worst response. The earlier you engage — assess the options honestly, open communication with the creditor, position ahead of enforcement, line up alternative capital before you are forced to — the more options remain. Workouts are won early, quietly, and through structure.

What this means if you are the one making the call

Three things matter more than anything else. Make your situation legible: be able to explain, in a paragraph, what the asset is, what the money does, and how it is repaid. Engage early, especially in distress, because options compound when you act before the deadline rather than at it. And understand the full breadth of the market, because the answer to a bank’s “no” is very often “yes” from a lender the bank has never competed with.

Capital behaves rationally. It moves toward situations it can understand and away from those it cannot. Most of the work, and most of the value, is in making a genuinely good situation understandable to the right source of capital before the clock runs out.