Ten Years at TwentyTwo: Growth

I recently celebrated 10 years with the team at TwentyTwo. A wonderful ten years where I’ve worked with a great team and great clients, many of whom I consider good friends!  I’ve also seen huge growth in our capability and services while also witness to more change in the property and workplace sectors than in the fifteen before it.

The world has shifted — technology, culture, politics, pandemics, booms and recessions – yet through all of this I remain more optimistic than ever that the significant role property plays in all forms of business and government.  Property is more frequently being recognised and escalated to the highest decision making levels – its about time. 

Below are a few thoughts that have been percolating in my mind to capture the key events of the past ten years.

Hybrid Working Needs Real Leadership

Hybrid working wasn’t a thing 10 years ago.  If you worked from home back then, you were clearly slacking. COVID forced flexibility and how amazing is it that its been adopted, embraced and really gets the best out of people – we think.  Perhaps theres not enough data or more importantly, too many organisations are still figuring out what hybrid actually means. It’s not a roster of office days — it’s a design, management, and culture challenge all at once. Without structure and leadership, it slowly erodes connection, mentorship, and team cohesion.

What worries me is the next generation. I’m watching my kids go into the workforce and seeing how different it is to when I first started out.  If young professionals spend half their careers at home while AI automates core skills, where will they learn judgment, collaboration, and leadership? Experience is built on proximity, observation, and conversation. See our recent research on the workplace in current times.

Then there’s the property conundrum. Has hybrid working permanently shrunk the office footprint and with it the scale of our portfolios and investments? Not as much as I had first thought it would. While some consolidation is happening, most leaders are balancing flexibility with presence — maintaining enough space for teams to reconnect. Fitouts are changing too. Offices now compete with home — more social, collaborative, and creative. But they don’t come cheap.

Hybrid working isn’t a trend anymore, its very real but still needs some navigating to ensure we don’t end up with a capability shortfall in the long term.

Is Local Government Broken?

Local Government has become one of the biggest paradoxes of the past decade.  I’ve worked with many councils across New Zealand and really enjoy each assignment – especially many council staff who are some of the most capable people I’ve worked with.  But the system is broken and I think its terribly sad that so many good people working within local government are at the receiving end of so much criticism which is not always their fault.

I’ll have a more detailed rant about this after the local elections, but my learning from the past ten years is that local government is in desperate need of major reform.

The Cost of Everything

Perhaps the most confronting experience over the past decade has been the “once in a generation” surge in construction costs that surfaced over the last eight years. It has had the most profound and far-reaching impact I’ve seen in my career. The domino effect on commercial rents, funding models, land values, and overall development activity has been nothing short of staggering.

Depending on the sector and scale, construction costs for vertical/commercial projects in NZ has seen an order-of-magnitude increase of ~45–55% over eight years — an escalation that has fundamentally reshaped project feasibility, investment appetite and how risk is priced. Projects that made sense in 2018 are now borderline impossible to justify without significant subsidy, redesign, value engineering. For many sadly, it means kicking property problems or projects down the road.

We’ve debated endlessly about when the correction will come — when prices might soften, margins ease, or “normal” returns. The truth is, this is the new normal. Even the most recent recession has done little more than slow momentum; it hasn’t reset or materially lowered the baseline. Labour, materials, compliance and importantly rents are all structurally higher.

The downstream effect remains unchanged: if you want new, it will cost you. Developers, councils, and occupiers are being forced to rethink what “value” means — focusing more on lifecycle performance, adaptability and consolidation.

For the property sector, this cost escalation has been a brutal but clarifying experience. It has forced innovation, and a rethink on where precious capital is deployed.

On the Bright Side

Over the last 10 years the property advisory and commercial transaction landscape has matured and adapted dramatically in my view. Today’s commercial developments are more complex, more sustainable, better organised and more connected than ever before. Environmental sustainability, health and safety, IOT and hybrid working has become embedded in development and design thinking — shaping how buildings function and how people engage with their spaces.

Equally noticeable is the shift in relationships. Ten years ago, stitching property deals and projects together could be adversarial and bordering on dysfunctional. Now, we’re seeing more partnering, more transparency and a genuine sense of collaboration between clients, developers and consultants. It’s a healthier, more productive way to work.

Oh, and we don’t have to wear suits or a tie everyday – how good is progress!

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