Feature
After the Fall
by Bill Ralston
Olly Newland, 20 years after the sharemarket crash that cost him a property empire.
Back in the day, there were the names Equiticorp, Judgecorp, Brierleys, Robert Jones Investments, the Renouf Corporation, Chase, Landmark, Goldcorp, and the equally famous names of the men who ran the high-flying corporations: Allan Hawkins, Bruce Judge, Sir Ron, Sir Bob, Sir Frank, Colin Reynolds and Peter Francis, Olly Newland, Ray Smith. At the time they appeared to be money-making machines and even their bankers seemed glamorous: Fay Richwhite, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the now deathly boring BNZ. These were wild times – Dom Perignon corks flying in the packed bar of the White Heron, leisurely fine dining at Bonaparte’s and eternal parties at Melba and Club Mirage.
Those few names that were not entirely erased from the public mind in the aftermath of the sharemarket crash of October 1987 have now assumed a much lower profile. In the early 80s you would have found Olly Newland in the baroque splendour of the Landmark Corporation’s Queen St office building in Auckland.
These days, he operates Newland Investments out of a small room stashed between a gym and a pilates instructor’s premises, down an alley from the Remuera Rd shops. That’s the way he likes it now. As he points out, he isn’t selling anything to anyone any more; it’s a functional place where he can talk to his tenants and do his paperwork on an ancient Apple computer.
It may be 20 years since the fall, but he is still concerned about his reputation and we enter a small negotiation about this story. “I want to stick to what happened in those days because I’m very conscious of the hurt many people went through.” He wants to ensure any article I write “Isn’t ‘Ha ha! He’s come back!’ It’s not a good look for me.” Of other property survivors from the 80s he says, “Those who have come back are invisible.”
The point about Newland’s comeback is that he never really went away. He lost control of Landmark Corporation and was ousted nearly two years before it went belly-up in the early 90s. His own financial fall came when one of his big backers, the DFC, itself imploded and the rabid bankers came after his heavily leveraged personal arsenal of investments. He fought his way back, slowly building up his property portfolio, and his own investment company is now in a pretty comfortable position. He concedes that he is worth nowhere near the $40 million he was once credited with. As he says, it was all on paper anyway.
“I tell you something I learnt … it doesn’t matter if you’ve got $4 million or $40 million. You really can’t spend more.” That is a significant shift from the Gordon Gekko Wall Street world of the “Greed is good!” 1980s.
He adds one other piece of hard-won philosophy. “The truly wealthy person is one who is content with what he has.”
On the 20th anniversary of the crash he’s republished Lost Property, his 1994 book about his experience of the boom times and the lessons learnt.
Surely, one of the first lessons would have been, in the words of the Kenny Rogers song, “Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away …” There must have been a point when he was worth $40 million, even on paper, where he considered cashing in his hand.
“Dead right, I should have. Some did.” He laughs ruefully. “It was such an exciting game. I didn’t cash in. I should have, of course. I had several offers. Like a fool I didn’t take them. I thought I’d be letting down my shareholders. I didn’t need to. It wasn’t the right thing to do. People like myself thought we were setting up some sort of dynasty that would be handed down, that we’d become famous in a hundred years.”
Clothed entirely in black, including a leather jacket that screams 80s! – he sits behind a huge antique leather-topped desk that looks as if it once graced a much more palatial office.
“We couldn’t conceive of a sharemarket crash that was so severe, especially as we were investing in property, not shares. We couldn’t conceive that the market could be so bad that it wiped all those plans out.”
Property seemed so secure. It was land, buildings, rental returns, it had intrinsic worth and, he explains, nothing was done without the finest professional, financial and legal advice.
“All the advice we got was based on the stock-market, the sharemarket of the time, not having a collapse. It may have corrections, that was fine, they were regarded as opportunities.” You can still sense his bewilderment. “Nobody ever took into account that the market could go and …”, he trails off, “… crash.”
That is what happened to so many property high-fliers. The sharemarket collapsed. They shrugged. Three more years of knackering interest rates, banks that panicked and wrote off the losses or hit the wall and – bang – they were dead. Sold up and dead in the water.
Page 1 2 
