The Interview
TIM GURNER
FOUNDER & CHAIRMAN GURNER GROUP
With Rob Langton - Ready Media Group
Tim Gurner survived the project that almost cost him his home, then built a private group with $14 billion of projects. His next ambition is different: turning Saint Haven into a global luxury brand. The project was supposed to cost $65 million. The first construction tender came in at $96 million. The second said $108 million. By the time Tim Gurner opened the third envelope and saw $130 million, he knew there had been no clerical error. The apartments in the third and final tower of FV, his vast development in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, had already been sold. Revenue was fixed. Financing was arranged. There was no buyer to whom another $30 million could be passed. Gurner went upstairs, opened the feasibility and ran outside. “I threw up in the garden for probably an hour,” he says. “Never, ever been so sick, so anxious. I thought the world was ending.” For much of the next year, Gurner, his wife Aimee, his accountant and senior staff gathered around an oval Carrara marble table and modelled the destruction: when the project’s equity would disappear, when the damage would spread to the rest of the business and, finally, when the family home would go. “This is when you lose your house. This is when you lose everything,” Gurner remembers being told. “It was horrendous.” It is a startling admission from a businessman better known for projecting certainty. His private group now says it has about $14 billion in development and management projects, with $1.65 billion in residential sales across seven projects in 2025. His next great project is not another tower. It is Saint Haven, the private longevity and wellness club he wants to establish in 50 major cities. “We don’t want Gurner to be a real estate developer or a club owner,” he says. “We want it to be a luxury lifestyle brand.” The ambition captures Gurner’s next chapter. He has turned instinct into product and product into brand. The question now is whether the intensity and intuition of one founder can become a global institution without losing what made it distinctive. For all the investment committees and institutional capital BUILT ON INSTINCT: THE MAKING OF TIM GURNER
surrounding him, Gurner remains an unusual mixture of precision and faith. He can draw the floor plan of every project and knows the numbers in every building, yet talks constantly about energy, signs and the “flow of life”. “There is no five-year strategic Tim Gurner plan,” he says. “If I don’t feel good on a site, we will not do it.” Gurner grew up on 25 acres at Kangaroo Ground, on Melbourne’s north-eastern fringe. His father, Colin, was an engineer who worked from home and shaped his business around the family. His mother, Sandie de Wolf, became a formidable welfare executive at Berry Street. They gave their son contrasting models of leadership. Colin was gentle and present; de Wolf was warm at home but steely in public. As a boy, Gurner watched journalists gather outside the family property after Berry Street was criticised over a contentious harm-reduction decision. His mother defended it, faced the cameras and walked back inside to become Mum again. “I remember thinking, Jesus, she’s resilient,” he says. The family had land and a rich home life, but little surplus cash. Gurner remembers returning items at the supermarket checkout after they exceeded the budget. He also remembers pretending to be sick so he could watch bulldozers transform the front garden. At university, waiting tables led to nightclub promotions with Nick Russian. One event drew about 2500 people. Gurner, socially anxious, stayed away from the door and stage. He was more interested in how a small group could create momentum, scarcity and a following. Tony Pride, the Elwood estate agent who hired him as a young “schlepper”, applied that lesson to property. Pride financed a $188,000 Art Deco apartment; Gurner renovated it and they sold it for $242,000. His $12,000 share was the first meaningful money he had made. His grandfather then lent him $34,000 to establish My Wellbeing, a personal-training studio in Elwood. NAB lent the 20-year-old another $150,000. It took Gurner 15 years to learn why: his mother had quietly allowed the bank to take
4 – September / October 2026
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