Mark Todd, the “accidental” property developer whose company is the chief sponsor of the country’s biggest literary awards, the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, is pretending to be apoplectic. He excels at pretending to be apoplectic and sometimes he actually is. He shouts: “I’m not a fucking leftie. I’m a fucking thinker.” He uses the F-word the way other people use commas.
If I inserted every example of every time he swore, the Listener letters inbox would implode. So I’m going to settle for removing most of the choicest examples from here on and you can choose to insert them yourself after every second word, or not, depending on your tolerance for swearing. That “every second word” is an exaggeration, but not a wild one.
“I like swearing,” he says, in a brilliant example of stating the bleeding obvious. Swearing provides emphasis and he is an emphatic character. You will never be in any doubt as to what the co-founder of Ockham Residential thinks about things, and the things he has emphatic opinions about are wide and varied, and sometimes contradictory.
He rails, for example, over the property development industry’s use of lobbyists. His company employs a lobbyist. He is too smart not to know that opens him up to accusations of hypocrisy. Pah.
“We just try to influence policy, cut through the bullshit. Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing and everyone will say they’re doing the right thing. So, I understand, you know, being charged with being a hypocrite. All I’m trying to do is broaden the viewpoints of ministers and bureaucrats and public officials.”
He had phoned me back after our interview because he’d had a thought and that thought was that he wanted to, yes, emphasise something that he’d already told me: that he was “100%” going to vote for incumbent Wayne Brown in Auckland’s next mayoral election. “After getting to know him and seeing what he’s done in public, he’s a pretty direct communicator. He doesn’t mind ruffling feathers.” Now who might that remind you of?
“And I’m telling you, he’s winning over all the middle voters in the city. He’s going to walk all over Paula Bennett [who’s considering a tilt] in the next election.”
Which is when I said, “But Mark, you’re a dyed-in-the-wool leftie.” Which is what provoked the explosion above. “I’m not really tribal about my politics.” He has mostly voted Labour or the Greens. “I had to vote Greens the last election. The last Labour government was disappointing …”
In the last mayoral election, he backed Efeso Collins, the left candidate, who died suddenly in February. He was the largest contributor to Collins’ campaign. He didn’t want to tell me how much he chipped in, but it has been reported as being $55,000. He won’t have to shell out for Brown’s campaign, I say. He’s rich. “Exactly!”
Accidentally rich
So is Todd. In addition to being an accidental property developer, he’s sort of also accidentally rich. He is not in the least interested in talking about being rich. Fair enough. It’s not his fault he ended up accidentally being rich now, is it?
He is, he says, in the “1%”, which is properly rich. Of course, nobody is going to mind being rich and obviously he believes in success and rewards. The day we spoke, he was waiting for the ferry to Waiheke Island, where he was taking his team for a fancy lunch. He is accidentally rich in the way that he is accidentally a property developer.
“Well, my degrees are in pure mathematics and philosophy. I consider myself an academic. I did a lot of labouring after I graduated, primarily so I could go surfing whenever the surf was good. My brother’s a builder and we started painting and renovating.”
They started building townhouses and, voilà, somehow he became a property developer. His company’s apartments are known for being somewhat nicer to live in, and look at, than most of the shoeboxes that have characterised intensification in Auckland, without necessarily carrying a premium price tag.
Todd spends money mucking about on the water in what is apparently the latest fad in water sports: foils. So really, he’s still, at heart, that 20-year-old beach bum. He likes being on the water because when you’re on the water you don’t have to think about other things, he says.
That, I believe, is what is called a good work-life balance, which he’d probably scoff at because it’s a cliché and he doesn’t deal in clichés. He deals in complex but clear thinking.
Another thing that makes him apoplectic is the state of “public discourse” in this and most other countries. He doesn’t waste time adding to what passes for that public discourse on social media. He remembers, “I’ve got a Facebook page”. He doesn’t think he’s looked at it in about 15 years.
He spends money on art: he’s an “art fanatic”. To that, he scoffs and says, “Where did you get that from?” Er, his website, which he has obviously not read. He says he’s never looked at it and the art reference must be something his former PR chap made up. Nah, he’s not an art fanatic – he is generally a fanatic.
He launched Ockham with Benjamin Preston in 2009. They were Mt Wellington kids. They were at kindy and primary school together and resumed their friendship at the University of Auckland. Preston made his dosh in merchant banking, then chucked it in and became a maths teacher.
The charitable aspect of Ockham was conceived at the same time as the business aspect. When NZ Post pulled out of sponsoring the book awards at the end of 2014, the philanthropic equivalent of the good knight on his white horse rode to the rescue with “north of six figures”. Todd believes in community: his apartment buildings have community spaces for residents. The book awards are about supporting the community of writers. He and his wife, Stephanie Jones, are involved because, he says, we need our writers. They are “particularly important for telling our stories, understanding our communities”.
And, of course, “I think it has definitely been good for our brand”. He means that the name Ockham is becoming recognised outside Auckland, and he thinks that within the next few years, they will be building apartments in other cities.
The company sponsors a wide range of mostly arty and some sporty endeavours, including the 1st XV at One Tree Hill College (his alma mater when it was called Penrose High) and leading club football team Auckland City FC. There’s the Ockham Collective, too, which provides residencies to creative types.
He and Preston prefer to call themselves “urban regenerators” rather than property developers. You can see why they might. It’s not often you see “property development company” and “book awards” in the same sentence. People are really very rude about property developers. Including him. Which brings us back, if we ever left it – and he never does – to urban sprawl.
At the opening of Ockham’s The Greenhouse apartments in Ponsonby in February, with special guest Mayor Brown, Sweary Todd took a swat at his least favourite buzzing bees: other property developers, who, he said, were out to make quick bucks developing land on the rural outskirts of the city.
“We have no shortage of high-density land. We don’t want to be developing in fucking Drury; it’s so wrong,” he said to a journalist about the proposed redevelopment of rural Drury into a town accommodating 60,000 people over 30 years. Said? More like exploded. In full-on explosive mode, he’s like a grenade that has had its pin pulled. “And,” he continued, because he hadn’t finished blowing things up, “it’s all those rapacious money-grubbing … those big old developers … you know who they are.”
“I don’t mind being controversial,” he told me in another of his examples of stating the bleeding obvious. I asked a question to which the answer would also be bleeding obvious: Does he have any property developer friends? “No. No. No one.”
Creative thinker
He had something of an epiphany about 10 years ago “when I was introduced to the art scene. And I realised that creativity is probably my highest value. Because I’m often going, ‘What’s the fucking point? Why am I doing this?’
“I really settled on creativity as a good reason and motivation to do things. When you do something creative, you’re making something, you’re imagining something. There are all sorts of ways to implement creativity: you can be creative in the way you raise your children, in how you approach your friendships – it’s not just art.”
What he loves most about his buildings is that they are creative. He bestows creative names on some: The Turing, The Isaac, Hypatia. All famous mathematicians and philosophers. This ought to be pretentious but is instead just clever. And who wouldn’t like to live in Hypatia? A thinker and mathematician, she taught philosophy and astronomy in ancient Egypt. You’d feel cleverer just by living there.
The company is named after the 12th-century theologian William of Ockham, whose Ockham’s razor principle of logic is usually boiled down to this: keep it simple, stupid. Auckland sprawl. Drury. That’s not creative. Don’t get him started. Ha, try stopping him. I just about managed to. He usually gives a speech at the book awards. Does he talk about books? Don’t be silly. According to a long-time attendee, he talks about politics. During one of his speeches, he lobbed one of his mouth-bombs about the shortcomings of Kāinga Ora under the last Labour government. Then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern was a guest. He doesn’t mind offending people.
You get the distinct impression it would be nigh on impossible to offend him. He’s fearless, really. He’s like a rally driver in a very fast car without brakes. If you see him driving towards you, get out of the way. I couldn’t keep up with him; I suspect few people can.Other than Brown, perhaps, who is similarly inclined to publicly and loudly swat whatever annoying bee happens to be buzzing around his bonnet at the time. They are not friends, but you can be fairly sure they are simpatico.
He doesn’t, by the way, have many close friends. He’s too busy with his kids and his work. Those he does have are friends from his youth, and Stephanie, his second wife. She works in public relations as a specialist senior writer. She started her career as news editor for the University of Auckland student magazine, Craccum. She is a judge for the Ngaio Marsh Awards for crime fiction and the NZ Booklovers Awards. She seems to run her husband’s diary, which sounds like a full-time job. She has had experience in crisis management. Which may or may not come in handy.
He has two children with his first wife, Amy, with whom he says he has “a really good relationship. We live within walking distance of each other. We’ve been separated since [the children, now 14 and 17] were very young.” He and Stephanie have a 10-year-old rescue dog called Hazel who is “a mongrel – a bit of terrier, a bit of Staffie”.
Like a wrecking ball
He’s an odd, and oddly endearing, mix of hothead and considered, calm and clear thinker. He is, like most clever people, complicated. He wants one word on his headstone: iconoclast. This is funny because he’s a residential property developer whose business is, obviously, putting things up. An iconoclast goes about pulling things ‒ long-held beliefs, mostly – down.
So, he’s a property developer whose brain sometimes doubles as a wrecking ball. I didn’t ask what his hobbies are. There was no need. They are thinking, arguing (he would no doubt say “debating”), making buildings that work and are creative, railing against idiots and governments, which may be the same thing.
He’s brainy. And practical; he’s a certified carpenter. He likes the sea. A rich beach bum with a philosophical bent and an art collection. He recently bought a Heather Straka work. You can see why he likes her art, which is about challenging stereotypes and societal traditions. If he was an artwork, he’d be a Straka.
His favourite book is Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, by John Ralston Saul, in which the author takes his own wrecking ball to institutions and anything else that takes his fancy, which is to say just about everything from politics to economies to societal norms. If Todd were a book, he’d be Voltaire’s Bastards. Of course it’s his favourite book. And, bonus: it’s got a swear word in the title.
The winners of the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards will be announced on May 15.
