Natgen was founded in 2019 and it’s the coalescence of about 25 years experience in this industry both by myself and my partners and our leadership team so we wanted to take what we’d leared in that time and put it together into the type of company that we wanted to take forward to investors and that was a wholesale focused company so that we have a relatively small number of investors which we can have with whom we can have excellent communications with and we can make sure that we’ve got a depth of relationship that means that we can present them with good quality opportunities and they can understand them because we’ve gone through the process of communicating what we’re about where we’re coming from and why we’re doing it.

The concentration of Natgen is particularly in commercial property, we’ve chosen that area over a long period of time and we’ve got a lot of experience there. It is quite difficult for an investor to actually get into the commercial property market without a very significant amount of money often millions of dollars so what we do is we provide investors with an opportunity to enter that market with less money and combine with other like-minded investors to collectively invest in larger assets.

So when I talk about our strategy it’s really making sure that we have a proactive strategy of what we’re doing to improve people’s wealth over time so really that’s making sure that we don’t just go out into the market and look what’s happening we and and just buy within a given market we actually have a long-term strategic approach to what we’re buying we think that our acquisition strategies are an important um area of difference for Natgen compared with some of our competitors for example we always try and buy off market so we don’t participate in public campaigns for assets because we often we feel that’s like a race to the top of the price spectrum.

We take a risk-managed approach to everything we do and because we’ve been around for a while we’ve seen a lot of what’s possible so we make sure that we consider a broad range of options when we take on any property for investors. My personal view is that the next two to three years will be very good there’ll be growth,  pre-COVID we were looking at a growth trajectory and I believe that will continue.

Our vision for Natgen is less about size and particular numbers of assets and more about the service provision and what we’re providing to our investors we want to be a place where investors can feel like they’re safely investing in our in our product which is is commercial property and that they come back again and again when we provide them with a future opportunity because when we provide them with an opportunity we are in essence putting the Natgen stamp of approval on it so they need to know what that means and that will be built up over time but what we can do to show that to them now is make sure we communicate with them well we tell them why we’re doing what we’re doing um we make sure that our due diligence is absolutely second to none and that we take a position on what is going to happen in the future so that they can be aware that we have planned and risk-managed that future.

Yeah, so we see investors looking around at what they can invest in and how they do that with a properly risk-managed approach.

Of course, a risk-managed approach would indicate having good diversification within your portfolio. So we’re not suggesting for a minute that Natgen trust should be a majority of people’s investment funds or even a large minority. It should be part of a balanced portfolio.

So we can provide that property part, and that gives a higher return profile but probably a lower capital growth profile than some of the others.

So you’re looking for a mix of capital growth and income in your portfolio, and commercial property and Natgen trusts are typically an income investment. That’s not always the case; we do have some opportunities which provide capital growth.

Particularly when I referred to development before, that’s probably going to have a more significant capital growth element over time but includes an income element as well.

Another differential with the residential market is that the return profile is quite different. So in a res, when you have a residential investment property, you’re often only netting a couple of percent return over time.

Once you’ve paid all your costs, a gross return of 5% per annum is unusual these days. It’s usually less than that. Take all the costs out and you’re down in the very low single figures.

Commercial properties tend to return more than that because of the nature of the tenants and the specificity of the use of them as well.

So we can see we’re purchasing properties at the moment with net returns of sort of 6–7%, and that’s translating into a return within our trusts in the 8 to 9% range.

And that’s pretty durable as well because we’ve got long leases, so you don’t have any of the trouble with tenants moving out every 6 or 12 months.

The state in which properties are returned to us is typically substantially better because we’ve got professional tenants as opposed to individuals.

And we can put similar tenants back into those sorts of places, typically with minimal capital expenditure to do so.

The management team of Natgen believes that we need to make sure that we give back as well when we’re in the business community. So we’re in the process at the moment of founding and launching the Natgen Foundation, which is a charitable foundation supporting defined charitable intents.

We’ve started endowing the foundation from Natgen itself as the manager, but we’ve also got some of our investors who have made charitable gifts to the foundation, which will supplement the amount of money that we have to distribute to charities year on year.

We have a number of areas of charitable giving that we seek to support, and some of those are mental health. We’re going to look specifically at suicide prevention and mental health support.

We’re also looking particularly at the moment at a charity that supports children who are victims of domestic violence in very tangible ways.

So really our causes are more likely to be social rather than anything else. We’re not particularly medical in our thinking; it’s more social causes that we’ll be putting the Natgen Foundation funds towards.

So in 2022 our focus is remaining on the convenience retail uh Regional and Suburban but also we’ve added a couple of extra things from from our analysis of the market in 2021. So for example we’ve got we see opportunities for um value growth in the uh Suburban office market.

And there’s a lot of press at the moment about changing of office habits and you know co-working and hybrid work practices and all that uh which is causing a level of uncertainty and a level of um inability for a market to correctly price the assets in that market.

So we’re we’re seeing that we think people are going to go back to offices. We think people will ultimately like to be back in offices because humans are communal people, we like to be together. So offices uh are not dead um and they’re not on life support, they’re actually coming back.

So we’re going to look for assets that uh we can take forward with an opportunity to increase the revenue of them by um repositioning them within their market and adding extra to them so that people’s lifestyles and their office environments are um are brought together.

What that actually looks like will depend on how the post covid recovery goes but we’ll get there in the end and we’ll do a lot of research before we choose assets and make sure how we’re going to improve them.

So the next area of focus in 2022 is we’re looking at industrial assets um that may have been mispriced in the market. Everyone knows that industrial assets have got more and more expensive during 2021 um due to uh pandemic related effects on usage of industrial space.

However, there are a lot of industrial properties that have been on reasonably long leases and they’re coming towards the end of those leases that really haven’t been reset to new market rates. So one of our uh focuses this year for 2022 will be to identify those assets and buy them into trusts that we then wait for the repricing of the leasing revenue from the property.

So that should happen over about the next 2 to 3 years but it’s actually a very measurable thing. So we’re able to take what those prices are today, measure the current rents on other properties and come up with what the value increment will be over time.

Another area that we have a fair bit of experience over the years with, which makes us somewhat unique, is actual development of assets from scratch. So 2022 looks to us like a good time to develop some assets from scratch from broad acre land into the areas where we see value in the future.

So we’ve got two developments at the moment that we’re working through our preliminary due diligence and we’ll add more to those assets as we come through 2022. And of course, they are somewhat longer process to get those into the market and into investors’ hands but that’s an area that we’re putting a lot of attention to as well.

The concentration of Natgen is particularly in commercial property uh we’ve chosen that area over a long period of time and we’ve got a lot of experience there.

It it’s quite difficult for an investor to actually get into the commercial property market without a very significant amount of money, often millions of dollars. So what we do is we provide investors with an opportunity to enter that market with less money um and combine with uh other like-minded investors to collectively invest in larger assets.

Larger assets mean um better security of tenure, better tenants, longer leases and all the things that you actually don’t get in the residential market.

The other thing that we particularly like long term about commercial is its measurability. We’re we’re very much into analytics and um whilst the residential market is probably more to do with uh to some extent sort of emotions and demographics, the commercial market is all about measurable things, all about statistics, all about where traffic flows are.

And we can we can measure those things with great accuracy. The other thing that we can then do is plan for the future better because we know where people are going and we can build facilities that replicate facilities where they’ve come from.

We don’t actually have to have a lot of imagination of what people are going to need in new places, they just need what they need at other places. So that’s another advantage we see uh in commercial.

Whilst I hesitate to give any predictions about what future economy is going to be like, I can certainly give you a prediction about how Natgen will handle it.

We take a risk-managed approach to everything we do and because we’ve been around for a while we’ve seen a lot of what’s possible, so we make sure that we consider a broad range of options when we take on any property for investors.

My personal view is that the next 2 to 3 years will be very good; there’ll be growth. Pre-covid we were looking at a growth trajectory and I believe that will continue.

Whether we’re likely to have higher interest rates or more inflation, I’m not certain of. There’s market talk of it, but I think we’re just as likely to have a relatively benign situation for the future. So I think it’s an excellent time to be investing in commercial property, but I always think it’s a good time to invest in commercial property.

Our vision for Natgen is less about size and particular numbers of assets and more about the service provision and what we’re providing to our investors. We want to be a place where investors can feel like they’re safely investing in our product, which is commercial property, and that they come back again and again when we provide them with a future opportunity.

Because when we provide them with an opportunity, we are in essence putting the Natgen stamp of approval on it, so they need to know what that means. And that will be built up over time. But what we can do to show that to them now is make sure we communicate with them well.

We tell them why we’re doing what we’re doing, we make sure that our due diligence is absolutely second to none, and that we take a position on what is going to happen in the future so that they can be aware that we have planned and risk-managed that future.