No.166: Michael Buxton
Melbourne property developer Michael Buxton is enjoying the fruits of his labours as he ponders how best to hand on his wealth.
A ruddy-faced Michael Buxton, fresh from two days of playing golf with his brother on King Island in Bass Strait, is all smiles as he greets The List at the gates of his Portsea mansion on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. The address is unmistakable. It’s on the famed Point Nepean Road – home to the seaside mansions of the Fox family and many others – and recognisable for the towering palm trees that adorn the spacious front yard, some of which Buxton specially imported from China.
Read the full 2021 edition of The List: Australia’s Richest 250
On a warm Friday afternoon in late summer, the Melbourne property developer, art collector and philanthropist is dressed in board shorts and T-shirt and wearing a bright red cap bearing the logo of one of the charities he supports. He’s eager to show me around the spectacular Arabic front garden he designed and built with the help of his landscape architecture consultant, Mike Stokes.
“What do you do with a piece of land that was a tennis court, and how do you want to live your life in this house? The Arab garden, to me, is part of paradise. It is something that is very beautiful but also very practical,” Buxton says proudly.
The centrepiece of any Arab garden is a fountain or sculpture and Buxton has carried on the tradition: a giant water feature urn topped with luscious fruit – all ceramic and built by a young craftsman from Ballarat – rises from the narrow, cool canals that take the sting off the surrounding sandstone. The garden walls are adorned with trellises laden with pears, apples and figs, plus a seemingly out-of-place mango tree, thousands of miles from its Queensland home. Buxton reckons it produces perfect, sweet fruit.
“This place gave us lots of things to do,” he says, beaming, as he turns his gaze to the two storey-home that boasts stunning views over Port Philip Bay beyond an expansive backyard, complete with a butler’s kitchen (where he cleans the seafood he regularly catches in the bay), lush buffalo grass, and deck. Buxton and his wife Janet bought the property in 1982 and retained one-third of the original timber building. The rest they made contemporary. “And it is profitable because we grow our own fruit and vegetables,” he adds.
He says Portsea has become their sanctuary over the past year and symbolic of where he is in life. He and Janet barely left during lockdown and plan to continue the ritual. For Christmas he bought his wife an electronic piano to go with his suave traditional version in the downstairs study. They are now learning to play together.
Buxton remains an executive director of MAB Corporation, the property development giant he founded with his brother Andrew – who is six years younger – in 1995. Decades earlier he co-founded Becton Property Group with fellow member of The List and close friend Max Beck, and together they built some of Melbourne’s most famed office towers, including 333 Collins Street.
“I have been an executive director of MAB for quite a long time,” Buxton says. “I’m on the board. Andy and I talk about whether we buy something or we don’t buy it. And we have outstanding staff. He is the MD, he runs the business. I was the visionary in the beginning, instrumental in solving problems, finding finance, and then eventually I became a board member. We have a good relationship, we get on socially. But we have never worried about wealth, and I think that is probably the key to the sustainability of what we have because we have enough. If we do better than that, so be it. We watch the numbers just to make a profit.”
I’ve really got a very good relationship with my kids. They have all been successful, so they don’t necessarily need to have a lot of money from me when I die.
Indeed in 2021, Michael Buxton, who received an AM in the Australia Day honours, is less focused on the ins and outs of MAB and more on the future of his children and enjoying his good health and happiness. We venture to the downstairs pool room, where during last year’s lockdown he and Janet played what they christened The COVID Cup. “We played 260 games, three games a night with our cocktails. I had a whisky and soda, she had a gin and tonic. I won by eight,” he says, holding up a pencilled scorecard on a dog-eared piece of paper. The ritual has continued after lockdown. “We are now playing the Easter Cup,” he says.
On the wall is a photo of Buxton’s late father Richard, who played 10,000 rounds of golf in his life and was still playing competitively at 94. He died only three months after his last round. One of six children, Buxton inherited his father’s love of golf, becoming a life member at the suave Victoria Golf Club in Melbourne’s sand-belt precinct. These days he prefers to play at Sorrento Golf Club, just up the road from his Portsea home. In the expansive garage outside the pool room sits a high-tech golf simulator he bought in 2017 that let him play 43 of the world’s best courses through lockdown without taking a step beyond the tee.
He’s played bridge twice a week for the past four years, and over the past 12 months it has all been on Zoom.“I plan the future,” he says. “You have to stay active mentally and physically. That is why I do yoga, swim and play golf. I see people who live a long time because they use their mind. That is why my wife and I have taken up the piano. These are age-resistant activities, so if you end up not being able to move very far, you are still very active.”
Half of Buxton’s wealth is tied up in MAB, the rest he controls with his immediate family. “Wealth has given me freedom,” he says. “Freedom is probably the most important thing, because then you have time to do other things.” In 2014, he gave $26 million to the University of Melbourne, including $10 million worth of works by major contemporary artists including Bill Henson, Howard Arkley and Patricia Piccinini, and $16 million towards the construction of a gallery dubbed the Michael Buxton Centre of Contemporary Arts (MBCOCA). He and Janet have also established a philanthropic foundation known as the Michael and Janet Buxton Foundation, which he says is “part of what we are giving to the kids”.
Three years ago, with the assistance of the Baillieu family-backed Mutual Trust, they established a family office known as the Michael Buxton Family Office. In January it appointed its first external chief executive, former MAB boss Mick Brennan.
“I’ve really got a very good relationship with my kids,” Buxton says. “They have all been successful, so they don’t necessarily need to have a lot of money from me when I die. So I said, let’s preserve it. You get some, the majority of it stays invested, is managed and goes all the way through. That money is education, foundation and support when you need it. Plus you all get a nice dividend. But it should go on. That’s not to say it will, but it would be great if they did. Our wealth is there to help each other. This is a multi-generation business. My constitution for the family office is for seven generations. That was based on research in Europe, America and China. We have already done seven generations in the Buxton family [In 1871 his great-grandfather, J.R. Buxton, founded an estate agency in Melbourne] so why not do another seven?”
Late last year Buxton moved to extend his decades of success in property development into the non-bank lending arena, joining forces with MaxCap co-founder Michael Fowler. The new firm, known as Corsair Investment Management, is now providing property loans and equity for residential, commercial and industrial projects. Buxton’s son Steve is a director of Corsair, which has grown from $35 million in capital to $200 million with Fowler’s assistance. “Corsair Capital I created because I used to fund all my kids in their development, and other people,” Buxton says. “It was about formalising that process and it is fantastic. I put my own capital in and my kids are running it.
“Michael Fowler came to us and we are now developing the external capital, and that has been pretty successful. It is a tough business at the moment. We have a lot of inquiries and it is just a matter of whether the deals are any good. I said to Steve ‘It doesn’t matter if we don’t make any money but don’t lose the capital’, and it has been a great exercise for my children.”
Buxton is also working with Smorgon family scion, and adviser to some of the richest families in the nation, David Smorgon, on further development of his family office and succession planning for the transition of his wealth to the next generation. He believes COVID and last year’s short, sharp recession in Australia was a good time for his children to think ‘It doesn’t go on forever’.
“They had 25 years of no recessions. Max Beck and I, when we started in 1974, we used to have a recession every four years,” he says. “We have been having discussions on the succession thing for the past 10 years. I am 76 now and you think about how long you can go. As long as I can keep doing all the other things I will keep going as long as I can. Everything we do is beautifully creative, it is exciting.”
So is the family’s succession plan sorted? “No,’’ he answers nonchalantly. So when will it be? “I don’t know,’’ he replies with a wry smile. “And that is the difficult thing, because none of my kids are in the MAB business. It is definitely work in progress. Is it a big worry? Probably not. We are wealthier than we ever thought we would be and we are self-sufficient. I guess the succession will either be sorted, or I die. And then someone else has the problem!”
Read the full 2021 edition of The List: Australia’s Richest 250