An industry stalwart who helped change the face of development and property in Australia is this year’s recipient of The Urban Developer’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Robert Hamilton, who with Henry Pollack in 1972 founded Mirvac, one of the nation’s largest and most respected property investment, development and management groups, was named the recipient at the awards gala at the Gold Coast on Thursday night.
Earlier in the day, as part of a wide-ranging discussion in front of several hundred guests, Hamilton admitted his start in the development industry, almost didn’t get off the ground.
“I was a terrible student,” he admitted.
“I'm actually dyslexic and had trouble learning at school. But as I got older, I seemed to overcome that and I got a good enough pass to go to university. And I thought I'd have a shot at doing medicine.
“Unfortunately, I didn't do chemistry or physics at high school and first year medicine was all about chemistry, physics, botany and zoology.
“So, I got the distinction in zoology and a credit in botany and failed in both physics and chemistry.”
The failed student left university and got a job selling real estate.
“And 63 years later, I'm still selling real estate. It’s how I got into it, and I'm very pleased. I did.”
Hamilton and Pollack’s story began in the early 1960s. Hamilton was a real estate specialist, a marketer and consultant to developers, while Pollack was a conceptualiser, an architect and builder.
They combined their talents to develop properties and from the success of that integrated approach with a shared dream, philosophy and vision, the pair launched Mirvac.
Over five decades, Mirvac’s approach to design, construction, people and places has been shaped by the vision and philosophy of its founders in a way that is almost unrivalled in Australian corporate history.
At the core of Mirvac’s success over 50 years has been a series of values and principles that have enabled the business to endure cycles and maintain relevance in an ever-changing market.
Hamilton says success in the industry is always about quality.
“It's quality right through. I mean, before we bought a site we’d do a lot of market research, we’d go and look at everybody else's projects, so we’d then buy sites which we believed were good quality and areas that people wanted to live,” he said.
“And then we’d look at the design of them. What do people want in their in an apartment or in a house, and I have always had a phobia about designing things, from the inside out.
“Unfortunately, a lot of architects today design the outside of the building without thinking too much about the inside. People live on the inside, they work on the inside of buildings, so you need to come up with a good floor plan, a good layout that people want to live in.”
Walker Corporation’s co-founder and chairman Lang Walker was the inaugural recipient of the award in 2019.
