Home, sweet home

RYAN MCCORMACK (OGC 2002), CO-OWNER OF BASE CABIN

Whilst not knowing exactly what I wanted to do as a career during school, my initial interest in the property industry was sparked during my Year 10 work experience placement, when I was lucky enough to work with a property advisory and valuation company.

Post College I started university life at RMIT undertaking a Bachelor of Business, before jumping across to their property course after the first year. After a couple of years of travelling during university I secured a graduate role on the cusp of the GFC with commercial property group, Savills.

My first day on the job, I went along to an office inspection, the client walked in, looked at the space and said ‘I’ll take it’…whilst I was thinking to myself this is going to be a walk in the park, I was quickly told that never happens!

Whilst the GFC wasn’t great for a lot of people, it definitely taught me that if you work hard, there are still opportunities and deals to be done in any market. Upon graduating, I spent a couple of years focusing on the retail leasing market with Savills, before jumping across to their newly formed commercial sales team. My time at Savills also instilled in me that having a great culture within an organisation makes no matter what you’re doing enjoyable (cold calling several hundred retailers). We certainly lived by the mantra of do deals, have fun.

As part of the commercial sales role, we also dealt with a lot of large land holders, and this is where my next opportunity opened. Moving across to the client-side role allowed the opportunity to also work in investment attraction with the State Government in real estate investment. This in turn opened an entry level development role as an assistant development manager (or ADM) on a government project and where I finally found an area of property that combined a passion of design, building and doing deals. Being a development manager really gives you the opportunity to shape and oversee a project from ‘cradle to grave’; analysing if a site or project is viable, through the design and planning stage, onto overseeing the sales of the end product and then the project being brought to life during the construction phase. It requires a whole host of skills, a lot of resilience and an ability to constantly foresee and then problem solve issues that will always inevitably come up in every project.

Over the last nine years I’ve moved from an ADM to more senior roles working on large scale precinct projects as part of the train station renewals and large infrastructure projects. All the while gaining experience in how to successfully integrate mixed use developments within existing precincts. Additionally - how these projects can completely change, for the better, people’s day to day interaction with a place. As our cities continue to grow, well considered and quality in-fill developments that are close to transport hubs are key to improving both our cities liveability whilst offering people a range of affordable housing options. Building on this love of design and bringing projects to life, I have been involved in founding a side project since 2020, building architecturally designed tiny houses through a startup, Base Cabin. I started Base Cabin with a friend, following his travels of North America, and experience of tiny houses there. We saw the potential of tiny houses in Australia, but also noticed that everyone in the Australian market was only replicating the same generic Americanised styles that already existed. They were not utilising the extraordinary design community we have in Australia (and especially Melbourne). At Base Cabin, we work closely with each architect on a new design to really push what is achievable within small spaces. This has resulted in unique and amazing spaces and has led to several awards in the first few years we’ve been operating. And whilst tiny houses are not a panacea to the housing crisis, they can contribute towards easing it, especially in the areas of short stay accommodation and regional tourism (both areas facing chronic shortages in the lead up to the Commonwealth Games in 2026). Base Cabin continues to grow and has really cemented itself as one of the premium tiny house builders in the country, especially focusing on the short stay accommodation market. It’s also great to mix up working between large scale precinct projects that generally take many years to come to fruition, through to a tiny house that can be built within a couple of months!