This snippet is from one of our previous episodes: Infrastructure: What’s the Game Changer for Property?

We all know property investing is about “location, location, location”… but have you ever stopped to think about how cities actually form?

In this TPC Gold episode, Bryce and Ben take us on a fascinating journey through time — from the dusty towns of the Wild West to the bustling megacities of today — to unpack the evolution of cities and why understanding this process can give you a huge edge as an investor.

They dive into the real-world application for investors:
👉 How do these megacity principles help you choose the right area to invest in?
👉 What clues can you spot today that hint at tomorrow’s growth?
👉 And how can you use this knowledge to write a new story for your portfolio?

Eyeing a regional centre or the next urban hotspot?

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Each 39-page report is packed with insights on local demographics, property dynamics, and 20 key statistics covering long-term growth, market cycle timing, days on market, and more.

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If You Enjoyed TPC Gold | How Cities are Built (and Why It Matters for Your Investment), You Might Also Like:

Transcript

Bryce Holdaway
So, Anthony Hopkins Ben… this is gonna lift ya. Are you ready for this?

Ben Kingsley
I’m pumped.

Bryce Holdaway
He wrote: “None of us are getting out of here alive”.

Ben Kingsley
…

Bryce Holdaway
There’s more. “Please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.” That’s a ripper, isn’t it? How good is that?

Ben Kingsley
Nice little motto or mottos to live by.

Bryce Holdaway
Came across my radar and I thought that’s something we want to share to our community.

Ben Kingsley
Thank you, Anthony. Academy Award winner.

Bryce Holdaway
So there’s no time for anything else; none of us are getting out of here alive. So do the things you’ve always wanted to do, which is really terrific. So today, Ben: Infrastructure. Now it was interesting… you sent a little note around to the team here and said let’s play a little pop quiz, and from that this podcast was born. So why don’t you start from the beginning?

Ben Kingsley
So there’s a couple of backstories there. Obviously Q&A on Monday night was all about immigration and population which then relates into infrastructure. We also know that Infrastructure Australia recently released a paper in terms of future cities, so that’s an excellent read for those of you budding researchers who want to get into that and urbanists. We’re talking to Infrastructure Australia and hopefully we might be able to get someone onto the podcast to take a deep dive into that. So that could be pretty exciting. But the point I’m making here is that a lot of people need to understand the connection between infrastructure and property prices. So the quiz that I sent out to all the staff was: What is the number one thing you need to grow property prices? Not only for the short term, but sustainably over a long term? And we got some great responses.

Bryce Holdaway
Anything with a wine bar was one of them.

Ben Kingsley
Yeah, we got all the things from fast speed trains to as long as they had wine bars. So there was a bit of banter going around the office as well which is all pretty exciting. But what we thought we’d do is and we haven’t frame worked this one in any way, shape or form today… But there’s a lot of moving parts of this and we hope that through this audio you can paint a picture in your mind in terms of how powerful and how you understand megacities are built. And then the importance of those megacities in terms of the long-term price story.

Bryce Holdaway
So from the discussion it seems like you’re a John Wayne fan because…

Ben Kingsley
Yeah, we were trying to sort of say, how do I start off? Well, just imagine if you’ve watched a Western in your time, and you’re out in the Wild West… and usually California or Wyoming or wherever it was, where basically the population was moving from the western coast of America to the eastern coast. You know, the classic story is they ride into a town… and what’s in the town? There’s obviously the essentials. There’s the general store where you pick up your supplies. The next thing is then the saloon, which is also the accommodation. So some people need a bed; they do need the shelter. So you’ve got your general store, you’ve got your saloon. Usually you’ve got your jail, you know, in terms of what that looks like. And then you’ve got your…

Bryce Holdaway
Bank, because they tried to rob the bank and ended up in jail?

Ben Kingsley
That’s it. And that is the infrastructure that you need. So I thought, okay, now that everyone can see that picture, how do cities actually get started? So I want to start with some ideas around some of the essentials, because if you get the essentials right, then we can move to the basics. And then from the basics, we can move to the advanced theory around infrastructure for property. So it’s how do you build a city? So I want to start with the critical things. In the quiz everyone was going to fast speed train. I’m like: no, no, no step it back a bit. Come back a bit.

So the first thing you actually need is usable land. Right? You can’t build a city at the top of Nepal or wherever it may be. It’s just, it’s difficult to build a big city topography wise. So you need usable land and then you need fresh water. They are two essentials. If you’ve got land and water, you can cultivate the land, harvest that and so forth. So you know, city locations historically have started in areas where there’s farming, where there’s gold, or where there’s, port access, where you can trade and bring goods and services in.

Sydney is a good example. You know, why did they ultimately decide on Sydney Harbour? And they decided on Sydney Harbour because it was a more sheltered port than the Botany Bay that they went into. So Botany Bay has got some of the more heavy industrial stuff and the container port, but Sydney was such a beautiful harbour. So that’s obviously one of the reasons why the city started there, and they built a great bridge and all those types of things.

Bryce Holdaway
It’s easy to forget that when these cities were founded a long time ago, we didn’t have a Tesla car with a Google map in it. It was, you know, horse and cart… and people had to move stuff from places, and water was a way to get from one place to another.

Ben Kingsley
100%. Mississippi River, one of the biggest examples. In Shanghai, the Yangtze River, another classic case of you can see coal being moved down that river in literally millions of tonnes a year. So very, very important internal rivers. Murray River is an example, you know, the steamboats would move goods and services up and down. So you need that form of transport.

Bryce Holdaway
If you think about it in Australia, you’ve got the Swan River in Perth, you’ve got the Torrens River in Adelaide, you’ve got the Brisbane River. You’ve got what you talked about in Sydney… here you’ve got the Yarra, in Hobart you’ve got the Derwent. So they’re all based around what you’re talking about.

Ben Kingsley
It’s all of those fundamentals. So if we were to extend that a little bit further, we also then need power and sewerage. But when you’re building a city, normally your sewerage and your power will scale up as the need requires it. So you’ve still got to disperse your sewage. You’ve still got to do all those types of things from a basic and abstract point of view. So you could argue that any city around Australia has the potential to be a megacity.

Like if you think about it, it’s like, well, okay, I know that maybe Shepparton is an example… or let’s go to Coffs Harbour. All of these other ports could have been those megacities, but ultimately a couple of the cities did become those larger cities, those capital cities as we call them around Australia. And they’re all reasonably sized cities. Some are big country towns like Adelaide, but our two megacities are Melbourne and Sydney. And there’s a reason why they’re megacities. And so we move from the essentials and come into this idea of the basics.

So what is the most important thing? My question to the staff was around what do you think it is? And my observation is that it’s jobs infrastructure. So when we talked about the Wild West, we talked about (how) the bank needs staff. The saloon needs bartenders and people to change the beds, and then the general store needs those goods to come in and out. But obviously they need to be constructed so they need to have builders. Well, the builders need to live locally because they’re not going to come from three hours by horse cart to basically do a half days’ labour and then go home. So everything starts to push into a location. And then once that motivation continues, it’s the jobs infrastructure.

So we moved from basically the industrial revolution that we had, all started to then provide new means for where we needed to house our workers. And we started to build high rise buildings. And we started to move towards mass supply of people in those locations. So if you start thinking about that, you’ve got the direct workers who are working inside the building and then all of a sudden you’ve got this mass population. Now when you’ve got this mass population, you need to feed them during the day; they need to go and have lunch. And maybe, you know, they need to have an hour break where they can go and sit in a park. And then well, I need a coffee shop and then in some cases, what about some places where they can buy clothes and do a bit of shopping during the day at lunchtime and those types of things. And so that’s what our cities have transformed.

And I would have thought through the technology age and through administrative work and what we call white collar work, these cities become unstoppable in this era. Where we’re going in the next 50 years and 100 years with transportation through… whether it be a hyperloop or whether it be through drones or self-driving cars. That is all a question, but there’s still going to be congestion in these megacities. So they’ve still got to solve that problem.

So for me, the jobs infrastructure was the number one when I correlate that back to property prices growing longer term. Because effectively some of these other locations have the opportunity to be the capitals of their states and globally, the same sort of principles apply. So it’s that jobs infrastructure that’s important to me. And so I call that jobs infrastructure, commercial buildings, I call it retail, I call it port infrastructure, I call it logistics infrastructure. So that’s how you normally build out your city.