Brown-Neaves builds a new legacy

Garry Brown-Neaves hasn’t lost touch with his roots.

His eagerness to lend a hand at a North Beach building site late last year exemplified the enthusiasm the Brown-Neaves Investments director has for the work on the ground.

“I was driving past a site and had my trowel in the car, and I know we have a bricklayer shortage so I got out to help,” Mr Brown-Neaves told Business News.

Mr Brown-Neaves is the first to admit he has become a little rusty at applying his learned trade, after 45 years off the tools.

“They would’ve paid me not to stay there,” he said.

Like his business partner of 29 years, Dale Alcock, Mr Brown-Neaves entered the industry as a bricklayer.

“I was kicked out of school at 14 and … my dad said, ‘You’re not going surfing, you’re going to become a brickie … [we’ve got] five kids in the family, you’re not sitting at home’,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

“[At that age] all I wanted was an ice cream and a hamburger from Peters by the Sea; I started on £5 a week [in] 1961.”

The Scarborough-raised businessman married at 19, continuing his work as a bricklayer until 1978 when he went into business with John Webb.

Mr Brown-Neaves’ first experience with owning a building company was with his brother Laurie through L & G Brown-Neaves in 1974, when he was laying bricks as well as running the day-to-day operations.

He and his wife, Diane, started a new business called G & D Brown-Neaves from 1976.

“That’s when I built my first display home and that’s where I first met John Webb,” Mr Brown-Neaves added.

ABN Group

Selling his family home in Duncraig in 1976 to John Webb, who was then a salesman for Peter Stannard, changed the course of Mr Brown-Neaves’ career.

“A couple of years later, he rang me at about midnight and asked me if I wanted to become his business partner,” Mr Brown-Neaves said of John Webb.

“We had a meeting the next morning, and that’s how we got together.”

Mr Brown-Neaves, who has experienced several peaks and troughs of the industry, recalls a period three years after going into business when times were particularly challenging.

Around 1981, the industry faced a period of low demand where the work just fell away, he said.

He took a rare outing to St Georges Terrace with Mr Webb that year to assess how they could keep the business afloat.

“We were broke, on paper we were bankrupt,” Mr Brown-Neaves told Business News.

 “But we had a great ANZ Bank manager … we went to the top floor… gave him our business plan, and he said, ‘I’m going to back you two guys’, and he did, and we were successful.”

However, Mr Brown-Neaves said he would not recommend others follow the company’s approach to break free of its financial woes.

 “Never do this, because you’ll go broke; we lowered our margin to just over breakeven, and we doubled our advertising,” he said.

In 1987, bricklayer Dale Alcock joined Mr Brown-Neaves and Mr Webb to form Dale Alcock Homes.

This grew into ABN Group, which to date has built more than 85,000 homes across Western Australia and Victoria.

John Webb sold his share of the business in 1988, with the intention of retiring. He later went on to start supply company Webb Waltham Plumbing Supplies.

Mr Brown-Neaves left ABN Group in 2016, and as part of the process sold 20 businesses to Mr Alcock.

“Dale and I had been partners for 29 years and I’d been in the business for 39 years, and I just got tired; I was knackered [and] not much value to anyone,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

“Dale recognised that and asked if I wanted to sell; I said yes, and that was it, [we] came up with a figure and I accepted, away we went.”

Business structure

After Mr Alcock bought him out, Brown-Neaves Investments was born.

The family office, based in North Beach, primarily operates in land development, with interests in commercial property, equities and first mortgages.

While land development and commercial property were familiar ground, Mr Brown-Neaves explained the other areas were new for him.

“That’s been the recent change since leaving the other business, I didn’t have any equities or first mortgage experience, [it’s] something we’ve learned in the last six years.

We’ve been working to keep putting our toe in the water,” he said.

Mr Brown-Neaves explained his business loaned money to other developers as an alternative funding stream to banks.

Equities, which comprises about 10 per cent of the business, provides another way of diversifying the business.

“Equities [is] totally bloody different … get the dartboard out and have a crack,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

In its land development arm, BrownNeaves Investments has 6,000 lots across WA, Queensland, Victoria and the ACT.

The company partners with major land developers including Parcel Property, Peet, Celsius Property Group, LWP Group, MGroup, Satterley Property Group and Qube.

“When I left Dale, I wanted to have fewer companies and we’ve ended up with heaps of other companies now through different projects,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

“It’s kind of the way it goes, at my age I should not be working, but I love it, so I keep on doing it.”

Garry Brown-Neaves and Dale Alcock in 2011.

Mr Brown-Neaves said acquisition opportunities came across his desk daily, and he was still very active in the space.

The group recently bought into Yanchep across two land projects, in conjunction with DevelopmentWA, Parcel Property and Peet.

Brown-Neaves Investments bought a 6 per cent stake of the 1,500-lot development at Yanchep Golf Course subdivision with Peet.

“We don’t normally go as low as that, but it was a unique opportunity to get in early into a really nice subdivision; that was the amount of share we could buy,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

On the commercial side, the company largely owns and leases out buildings. Its focus this year has been in Herdsman, where it leases out five office buildings totalling close to 11,000 square metres, and is lodging plans to develop an additional 20,000sqm office building on Hasler Road.

Mr Brown-Neaves said the company’s recent deal, via Axia Corporate Property, Altegra Property Group and Knight Frank, showed the strength in the Herdsman market.

He said the company wanted to move towards holding more commercial assets within land subdivisions, instead of selling the commercial opportunities to other developers.

The company’s proposal for an office tower in Herdsman. Image: DMG Architecture

Mr Brown-Neaves’ days are structured very differently to his time at ABN Group.

The 76 year old has more time to do the things he loves, which he describes as “anything ending in ‘ing’”.

Outside of work, he can be found surfing, boating, fishing, walking or in the gym (exercising). He added that his current role, working with four staff, came with substantially less stress.

“At one point, we had 1,800 people working for us [at ABN], in Melbourne and Perth and if things are going hard, you worry about their jobs,” he said.

“It’s a big responsibility when you’re running a big company, it’s very emotionally hard.”

Mr Brown-Neaves still works with Mr Alcock regularly, particularly through ABN Group’s commercial arm Parcel Property.

He showed an appreciation for the family office structure, a marked departure from the fast-paced environment of ABN Group.

“[At] ABN the business was so big, and decisions had to be made quickly, [and] there’s no time to involve family,” Mr Brown-Neaves said.

“It was Dale and me making the decisions on a day-to-day basis … [but] … now we have our quarterly family meetings and the family is getting bigger so I need a bigger boardroom.”

Mr Brown-Neaves added that he was involving his family more in the business each day, including his wife, their daughters Rebecca and Rachel, their husbands and children.