Our special guest on this episode is Terry Snow AM - Executive Chairman of Capital Airport Group, Co-Founder & Chair of the Snow Foundation & Owner of Willinga Park.
Terry’s journey in both business & in life is undoubtedly one of Australia’s most remarkable & enduring - born in Canberra in 1943 to a family with a rich heritage and attachment to the ACT that dates back over two generations to his grandfather E.R Snow, the proprietor of the region’s first general store known as ‘Snows’, Terry has established a formidable career over the past sixty years that has changed the landscape for generations to come.
Following graduation from Canberra Grammar School in 1961, Terry re-located to Melbourne and enrolled in an accountancy degree, later practising as a certified accountant in Canberra before finding the monotony of the profession limiting as compared with his love of dealing with people.
In the 1970’s, a career change led him to real estate, a profession far more suited to his engaging personality and a field in which he excelled at over the course of a number of years.
Utilising the skills he’d learnt from this period of his life, he then turned his hand to property development, initially through the development of small industrial projects before later building larger office assets through Capital Property Trust (CPT) - a vehicle established alongside his brother George that followed in the footsteps of their father’s business, Capital Property Group.
Throughout the course of the 1980’s and early 1990’s & under the stewardship of Terry & George, Capital Property Trust grew to become the largest non-government owner of property in the ACT, incorporating over eleven assets, underpinned predominantly by long-term leases from Government tenants.
The burgeoning success of CPT seeded the establishment of the Snow Foundation in 1991 with an initial $1m contribution, a philanthropic organisation that over the past three decades has assisted over four-hundred-and-fifty organisations through over $68m in disbursements - a division of the family’s diverse interests that remains one of its cornerstones.
By 1996, Terry & George had grown Capital Property Trust into a business with over $530m of funds under management, laying the foundations for Mirvac to acquire a majority stake in a circa $70m deal, a transaction that enabled the pair to move away from the challenges that surround listed company ownership.
Utilising the proceeds from the sale of CPT, Terry purchased Canberra Airport from the Federal Government in May of 1998 in a $65m transaction - a deal that has gone down in Australian corporate history as one of the most astute, with his private company Capital Airport Group transforming the site through more than $1bn of investment from sheep paddocks to an integrated accommodation, industrial, office, business park and aerotropolis precinct now valued in excess of $3.0bn.
Alongside the remarkable growth of Canberra Airport over the past two-decades, Capital Property Group has undertaken a number of other precinct-defining projects including Constitution Place, Civic and the mixed-use Denman Prospect development to name a few - additionally, the group has also supported several early-stage firms through the strategic deployment of capital.
In 2002 and spurned on by a long-held family association with the area, Terry began amassing landholdings in Bawley Point to create a 2300-acre equestrian parkland now known as Willinga Park - arguably the World’s finest equestrian precinct that also encompasses commercial farming, conferencing, training, and restaurant facilities.
Our exclusive interview with Terry Snow AM explores his background, the evolution of Capital Property Group, his passion for philanthropy, the key drivers for success in both life and business and how both the Snow Foundation and Capital Airport Group are embarking on their next stage of growth.
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