Family-owned JLF Group has an annual turnover for $100m in the affordable housing sector

When John Fitzgerald left the cold of Melbourne with $200 in his pocket he found ‘paradise’ and built a $100m plus development company with a difference.

When John Fitzgerald left the cold and rain behind in Melbourne more than 40 years ago there was only one place he wanted to end up.

With $200 in his pocket, the then 17-year old hitchhiked to the Gold Coast and never looked back.

“There was nothing for me in Melbourne in 1980 I can tell you. The Gold Coast was paradise,” he said.

Since arriving in the promised land he has built his family-owned JLF Group into a business focused on affordable residential land development, having created more than 5000 allotments and over 10,000 house and land packages mostly in South East Queensland.

With day-to-day operations now run by Mr Fitzgerald’s nephew James, JLF Group has an annual turnover of more than $100m. It encompasses 26 different entities including development and property management and its Custodian Wealthbuilders arm has helped thousands of Australians create financial independence for themselves through a structured program of residential property investment.

It’s a far cry from where he started in a family of five kids in Melbourne’s south eastern suburbs. It was a challenging childhood with his father dying in a car accident when he was eight and two years later was packed off to St Patrick’s College in Ballarat.

“Going to school in Ballarat it was freezing cold and I thought let’s go somewhere where you don’t have to wear three layers,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

“I heard there were girls in the 1980s walking down Cavill Ave in Surfers Paradise in their bikinis and I thought I had to see that. I’d never been outside of Victoria at that stage.

“When I arrived I was 17 and I was always diligent, hardworking and quick with numbers and I thought if I was going to have any chance of making money I needed to get into either shares or property.”

JLF Group managing director James Fitzgerald and founder John Fitzgerald.

Mr Fitzgerald chose property and started out with Surfers Paradise real estate agent Bert Cockerill. Realising he wanted to do more than agency work he stepped up and by the time he was 25 he was behind multimillion-dollar subdivisions and had a multimillion dollar property portfolio.

In the 1990s he transitioned JLF Group from solely development to offering a full service to customers including education.

“It worried me that the welfare costs in Australia were increasing at an unsustainable rate so I wrote a book 7 Steps to Wealth and have been educating Australians ever since,” he said.

“I’m hoping to move the dial from the 5 per cent self funded in retirees to 10 per cent.”

Mr Fitzgerald is also the chairman and founding benefactor of Toogoolawa Children’s Home Ltd, which has fostered 1580 youths at risk or wards of the state. He also established and runs a unique school for boys who have learning and behaviour problems that make them no longer welcome in mainstream schools.

“One of my mentors pointed out to me that I had to learn how to practice humility, work out how you can contribute. I was not a youth at risk but I was a kid who didn't cope well at school after my dad died so I wanted to work with kids at risk,” he said.

“We take the kids no other school would take and for us seeing them get a job and get on with their lives is really fantastic.”

Mr Fitzgerald took a step back from the business in 2021 when his nephew James – a lawyer by training – took the reins of the Gold Coast headquartered business.

JLF Group managing director James Fitzgerald and founder John Fitzgerald.

James Fitzgerald said he was almost 21 and doing his articles at a law firm Southport when his uncle asked him to do a couple of weeks of work experience.

The Somerset College product who completed his law and accounting degree at Bond University then landed a role as his Uncle John’s PA and over the 10 years learned every facet of the operation, before becoming managing director.

“Business is going really well. Everyone who says things are good or bad are over simplifying it. There’s always challenges and there different challenges you’re navigating at different stages of the economic cycle,” he said.

Like his uncle, James, 33, is also an author having written Bulletproof Investing in 2020 after his father David passed away when he was hit by a train in March 2019.

Using his personal stories and experiences the book focuses on how people can gain and retain financial control of their lives.

“The motivation for me was to share my father’s story about his struggles with money and anxiety linked to money. He’d been broke three times. We don’t really know what happened when he got hit by the train. He had a bit of alcohol and sleeping tablets in his system,” he said.

“What we found out after the event was that he was taking sleeping tablets since about my age every single night to get to sleep such was his anxiety over money.”

James said looking back on his life it was no surprise he studied two on the most conservative disciplines he could find – law and accounting.

“Having said that – that conservatism is something I had to almost unlock. First and foremost you can’t avoid risk. If you want to get ahead in life you have to take a bit of risk but you just have find a way to manage risk.,” he said.

“That’s the job of a property developer. You have to come up with plan A, B, C and D. The second one is you can’t just work hard, you have to work smart. Going forward I think the financial literacy and Australians prospects for retirement is one of the biggest issues if not biggest issue Australia faces in the medium to long term.”