IntheBlack: Short Talk

IntheBlack, April 2011

Short Talk: Michael Tanujaya, Lend Lease

In many careers there comes a point when it’s time to take a risk. For Michael Tanujaya, that point came several years into a successful career at Lend Lease, Australia’s largest integrated property development group. He was working in head office in Sydney, rising through the ranks and doing well. And then an opportunity came up in Singapore.

“Australia is a fortunate country: it missed the global financial crisis, it’s booming, and I was very comfortable there in head office,” says Tanujaya. “But I noticed that in headquarters, you don’t get into the details too often. You’ll be managing a certain stream of work but you don’t see the actual negotiations that are happening within it. You don’t go in at the deep end.”

Going to a foreign office, he decided, would get him into the heart of negotiations, speaking with agents, tenants, investors and banks. “Asia’s going to be the next world market, no doubt,” he says, so there was voluminous opportunity to get involved. He took the plunge and, one year on, has not looked back. “Coming to Asia I deal with the head of Bovis [Lend Lease’s construction arm], with the head of retail development, with the banks to negotiate the debt. I lead the investment side of tenders, oversee financing models, get commitments on pricing and design. It’s not an opportunity you get sitting in head office.”

Lend Lease is associated with some big projects in Asia – it was the project manager on Malaysia’s landmark Petronas Towers, and in Singapore recently completed 313 Somerset, one of the city’s most exclusive retail developments. But it’s also a foreign competitor against some local heavyweights such as CapitaLand, which are not only world-class developers but are part-owned by the Singapore state. But the sense of being an underdog seems to appeal: he was instrumental in the team that recently won the bid to develop Jurong Gateway, another retail development in Singapore’s west, a hotly contested bid that CapitaLand had very much expected to win. “It’s a tough market,” he says. “But it is very transparent: you know what’s coming up, you put in a price and you find out the same day if you win the bid.”

His role in Singapore covers investment and product development, which includes seeking new institutional investors and finding the right projects to invest in. He covers both Singapore and a newly-established team in Shanghai, China. Both locations are going to be instrumental for Lend Lease’s future growth.

“I think my CPA background has helped a lot in Asia,” he adds. “It’s given me a broader skill set – I know my accounting and tax but also do a lot of business strategy work, and for that I still go back to my CPA folders.”

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When Michael Tanujaya left Melbourne University, he thought he wanted a career in banking, not property, and joined the commercial arm of General Electric. After almost three years in Melbourne he was transferred to GE’s head office in Connecticut for two years.

While the opportunity was great, Tanujaya was keen to return to Australia, and had decided that rather than banking, his calling was in property. In Sydney, he found Lend Lease was hiring. “They said: ‘what do you know about property?’” he recalls. “I said, at the end of the day, you build something and people will come.” His approach won over the interviewers and he was hired.

It was a baptism of fire. Immediately placed in the project finance division, he was involved in Lend Lease’s pitch for the iconic Darling Walk site in Sydney’s Darling Harbour development. “There I was,” he says. “I didn’t really know anything about real estate, and they asked me to build a financial model and figure out what the land price was worth. On my first day, I stayed back until 12 a.m. But it was a good learning curve; the best way to learn is to go through the pain yourself.”

After six months he moved within Lend Lease to a new role in the investment management team, which has private equity characteristics and was better suited to his financial experience. The opportunity in Singapore then came along; he has held the role for about a year.