From renovating houses at 19 to running a $250-million Adelaide project, Citify’s Joel Wilkinson has built a business that has grown up alongside the city itself.
And the counter-cyclical market is staying strong even in a downturn, managing director Joel Wilkinson told our Blueprint podcast.
But it has been an uphill journey and required a big investment in education.
“When you’re learning [from people developers] you are picking up all their mistakes and even if you learn just one mistake not to make when you’ve done the course, one mistake that could be replicated 50 times…[those courses] paid themselves off in spades.”
And this philosophy has extended to his wider team, which is growing every year and working on projects from townhouses at Torrensville to the $250-million Buckingham Arms redevelopment .
“Buckingham is the biggest project we’re doing today. That’s $135 million build cost. So we’ve had to upskill the team. We’ve got 20 employees now on that, working specifically just on that project,” he says.
Citify has also been a builder-developer for 10 years.
“We take ownership of the entire development cycle, and you get some rewards with that and some benefits,” Wilkinson said.
“You get risk mitigation because if you’re designing something and then you have to build it, you’re at the same time thinking about how we’re going to do what’s drawn on this piece of paper from the architect.”
Developers like Citify have been able to thrive in the counter-cyclical market and it’s still going strong, despite the housing price downturn. In fact, things are looking good for the South Australian capital.
“Adelaide has historically not trended downwards. We trend sideways and gradually up the last five years to be the exception to that,” Wilkinson said.
“But we’ve got a number of big infrastructure projects that are on the go at the moment. They provide a lot of job opportunities.
“And the CBD itself has a lot of vertical growth opportunities, which we are focusing on being the best that we can be in that field itself as a developer builder.
“Adelaide’s got a bright future ahead.”
Listen to the Blueprint podcast with Joel Wilkinson on Spotify , Apple Music and YouTube .
