Corporate News

Living in a community where people are engaged and happy doesn’t just happen; it needs a solid plan, Villawood’s Rory Costelloe has told the Geelong Advertiser in an insightful Q&A.

What does your business do, who are your customers and what makes it unique?

We’re land developers who build unique residents’ clubs to create real communities. Our strongest differentiating factor is the club model and our strong community focus. We’ve created almost 80 new communities across Australia, with another 26 presently on the market and 25 more in our pipeline. All up, more than 51,000 homes.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in business and how did you overcome it?

Dealing with government planning systems is the biggest challenge. It’s a never-ending, always-growing bureaucracy. The planning industry is holding back supply dramatically. If we got that up and running and made our system far less red tape-heavy, we could get many more houses on the ground.

What’s one decision that had the biggest impact on your success?

Being brave enough to buy our first property in Melbourne and moving our early operations from Bendigo, where we started, to Melbourne. From there, we’ve been able to expand to all mainland states of Australia – we have a presence from Perth in WA to Cairns in Far North Queensland.

What’s a lesson you wish you’d learnt sooner?

Everything has been a slow learning curve but I’ve been lucky enough to have had hard working, intelligent people mentor me all along the way.

What’s the best piece of advice you’d give to someone starting out?

There’s no such thing as a get-rich scheme. Always leave a dollar in it for the next bloke. And also, you can either own the whole of a small pie or have 350 shareholders and share in a much larger pie.

How do you find and keep great employees?

It’s getting harder to find them, as young employees like moving on to the next opportunity. The thing is to give them projects they can be proud of, unlike some other developers. Then they can be proud of what they produce in new communities and stay on at that job.

What’s next for your business?

We’ll keep fine-tuning our residents’ club model to continue to create healthy and safe communities. And keep adding more benefits to our clubs, for example, childcare and community gardens.

Also, to lead responsible Australian housing with thermal design and efficiencies to withstand ever-increasing temperatures extremes in the most cost-effective, energy-saving manner through good design, solar and batteries.