Sir Bob Geldof’s advice to Australia’s property players

“Tread softly, property dudes, because you can tread on people’s dreams.” So said the philanthropist, humanitarian, businessman and musician Sir Bob Geldof at The Property Congress last week.

Few people were more famous than Geldof in the 1980s. The lead-singer of the Boomtown Rats, Geldof’s humanitarian work made him a household name across the globe as 1.9 billion people tuned into the Live Aid concerts in 1985.

A highly-astute businessman with a net worth estimated to be around $100 million, Geldof told the audience he’d never seen the world so “fractious, fearful and fragile”.

Trust was at an “all time low”. The global financial crisis has “ruined the trust, quite rightly, in all those institutions we were led to believe in”.

The property industry was the “canary in the coalmine” or the “bellwether” for the broader economy, he said.

Geldof admitted he had “no real experience” in the business of property development, but like the rest of us, lived his life “in the stuff you and your colleagues have built”.

He grew up in bedsits in Ireland, as his father rented rooms out to make ends meet. After leaving school he “pitched up in London” and busked on the streets, squatting and sleeping “in the cribs of churches”.

After rock stardom and chart-toppers came calling, Geldof bought his first home at the age of 26, and now owns “a few”.

“What a weird business you people are engaged in,” he mused.

It was the only business with “profound psychological implications” as property is “bound to the most intimate and personal aspects of people’s lives”, he said.

“Housing deals with that most urgent and necessary of human desires – the home. Not a house. A home. The two are distinct and different.”

A home cannot be quantified, and is “entirely metaphysical,” Geldof said. A house is a physical structure of which it is “easy to work out its value”. But a home is the “place where life plays itself out”.

“People invest all they have now and in the future – materially, financially and emotionally – into this one asset.”

The instability of global politics – the “insanity” of Trump and Brexit fuelled by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the “abandoned homes and ruined lives” in Greece, independence movements in Catalonia and Scotland, Erdogan in Turkey and the shift to the far right in Austria – were all symptoms of an “asymmetry” in our system, he said.

Geldof wondered why housing unaffordability could grip places like Australia, where there was “endless amounts of land”. It was “untenable” that a Sydneysider couldn’t find a one-bedroom bedsit for $6 a week.

Equally untenable was the lot of the Dublin taxi driver who had lost his home and life savings as the Celtic tiger economy tumbled. How could it be possible, Geldof asked, that 17 million people could live in abject poverty in Angola, while the shoreline of Luanda boasted the most expensive real estate on the planet? And what fate awaited London, a city which generates nearly a quarter of the UK’s GDP, when nurses and police officers couldn’t afford to live there?

If you cannot afford to buy a home, you are “deep in the centre of the problem” in our world. And this explained the high level of mistrust.

For “too long” there had been this “weird notion” that the economy and society are “somehow different and separate”.

“They are not,” Geldof said.

“Economic progress without social progress is a mean, dispirited, self-defeating, weak-willed thing. The good economy and the good society go together.

“We can’t just simply build these endlessly beautiful buildings, because they won’t survive very long unless we get to the nub of the matter.”

And the nub of the matter? “There are whole economies that require a new politics.”

Geldof’s pessimism (he gleefully admitted that fellow Irish superstar Bono wants to “give the world a hug” while he tries to “punch it in the face”) was tempered with some practical advice.

In today’s brave new world, communities placed more trust in business than in politics or finance. But “business must be embedded in society or it has no function”.

The property industry which is engaged with the “intimate, the personal, the present and the future”, can play a central role in building a better world.

And as the world expands to accommodate nine or 10 billion people within the next three decades, Geldof said the property industry is “essential and crucial to the next century”.