Cameron Shephard brings a family history in land development to his new role as state president of the UDIA.
When he was a young boy, Cameron Shephard spent many Sunday afternoons driving around Perth’s fringe suburbs with his father, David, checking out new developments and opportunities for the family’s fledgling business.
The business had its origins in 1969, when David Shephard left his accounting job to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in building and property development.
His business evolved into Amex Corporation, which has a specialist focus on residential estate developments, with operations in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria.
Cameron and his brother, Adam, subsequently took the reins, though their father and his business partner, Peter Dawes, are still involved on the company’s board of directors.
The brothers each started their working lives outside the family business, with Cameron working for Knight Frank before joining Amex in 1995. Adam worked in merchant banking in Sydney before returning in 2001.
Cameron has been on the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) council since 2001 and vice president since 2009 as part of a succession plan that has seen him elected to the top role for a two-year term.
He believes the family’s history in land development, and Amex’s operations across three states, give him a good perspective on the sector, and he does not always like what he sees.
“I’m going to continue the advocacy role, and that’s trying to drive reform to the planning system that is getting worse and worse,” Mr Shephard tells WA Business News.
In preparing for the new role, he recently read the minutes of the UDIA’s 1971 council meeting, when the industry body was formed in WA.
“It was fascinating, if not disheartening, that exactly the same issues are around today,” he says.
Mr Shephard says that “layers of bureaucracy” and complex regulation are part of the problem, but he has no interest in pointing the finger of blame.
“We need to sit down with the regulators and work out how we got to this point,” he says.
“It’s incumbent on all of us to sit down and look at where we have come from over the past 40 years and where we can go in the next 40 years.”
He is particularly concerned about the impact of infrastructure charges levied by local councils and has seen first-hand the adverse impact in other states.
“What I can bring to the table is that the charges got to a level (in NSW) that they crippled the industry,” he says.
Mr Shephard sees the new state planning strategy as an opportunity to bring about significant change.
He is keen for the Department of Planning and the WA Planning Commission to take a lead role.
“I’ll be calling for them to really show leadership. The system is very important but leadership is crucial,” he says.
Looking to the longer-term, Mr Shephard has a more ambitious goal.
“I want to try and change the perception of the development industry to the general public,” he says.
He is frustrated that development is often seen as “bad until proven otherwise”.
Mr Shephard says the ‘nimby’ (not in my backyard) mindset has always been around but believes community activists are getting more powerful, helped by improved access to information on the internet and growing use of social media.
“That is being used in a way that makes development more difficult,” he says.
“The irony is that development delivers a lot of benefits to the community.”
He believes part of the answer is to better explain the quality of life benefits that good land development can deliver.
He points to Amex’s own developments, starting with Livingstone Estate, which was one of the first residential developments at Canning Vale.
The group has two developments underway – Tuart Ridge at Baldivis, in Perth’s southern suburbs, where the group is developing 650 lots, and the smaller Valencia Springs development in Queensland.
The timeline for the Tuart Ridge development – the land was bought in 1999, construction started in 2006 and first land sales were achieved in 2007 – is typical of Amex’s current business model.
Mr Shephard says larger, listed companies, such as Australand, Stockland and Peet, place a premium on land development opportunities with a shorter time horizon.
“Their cost of capital is lower than ours, so they are able to pay more for those assets,” he says.
As a family owned business, Amex focuses on longer-term development opportunities, ideally with a five to seven-year time horizon.
“We realised we could buy land that was further away from the development front, than the public companies,” he says.
“We don’t have the same pressures to pay dividends every six months and lift earnings per share and those sorts of things.
“We could then use our skills to get the land rezoned and bring them to development.”
In some cases, Amex has sold parcels of land after getting them rezoned, and in others it takes the development to maturity.
In total, the group has a land bank of just under 10,000 lots spread across six developments, including a 54-hectare site at Wellard, south of Perth, and two sites in Melbourne.
The group’s largest development opportunity is Ripley Valley, located west of Brisbane and covering an area of 100 square kilometres. Amex has partnered with private family investors to fund the Ripley Valley development, which is about a year away from development, and will have more than 6,000 residential lots.
