Spent the weekend at the Developing for Profit workshop in Brisbane.
I felt it was excellent value....well organized and catered for.
One of the real value adds was meeting a bunch of highly motivated positive people, with a diverse range of investment and development experience. The Reno Kings do a great job of keeping everyone in a good mood and encouraging networking.
Some of the content I've accumulated from various sources through the years, but it helps to get it repeated a few times from different mouths, because that gives you the confidence there must be some truth in it.
We're certainly considering using Justin Eslake for our next development site purchase. The importance of having an army/team and a process in place, that can be executed confidently and quickly, is becoming ever more apparent.
There's topics I think they could add, but they make no pretence about being all things to all people. i.e. I'd like to see them move towards covering how to emulate the professionalism of a Mirvac, Metricon, or Stockland. Scale it down of course for smaller niche projects, but use the same disciplined systems and processes as these guys, especially economic forecasting to manage risk and better market research to gauge demand, project management etc.
The reason I say this is because learning a disciplined systems based approach will be just as pertinent in 5-10 years. Whereas examples of projects that succeeded in the last few years, may actually be dangerous to emulate in 5-10 years. Nevertheless, the boys didn't have that background, and it is very much their personal experience, and the advice of the many highly regarded professional consultants that spoke.