Commercial property finds its place on television

“We’re all obsessed by residential real estate on TV, but commercial property is far more interesting,” he said. “As well as the scale, the complexity and the human drama, it’s where all the real cutting-edge design and innovation happens.

“In addition, its architecture and engineering touch millions and millions of people’s lives as they walk through precincts, visit shopping centres, work in offices and go to industrial estates, and it has the power to change cities. It’s such an exciting sector.”

Now Thomas is about to fill that gap in TV programming. With his company Igloo Media, he’s making a 13-part series of half-hour shows on the best commercial developments around the world that will air next year on the Discovery Channel and on a number of airlines’ in-flight entertainment networks.

The Australian developments on which he’s already completed half-hour programs include Sydney’s Brookfield Place and Quay Quarter Tower, and Melbourne’s 405 Bourke Street. He’s in pre-production on three more that he can’t yet reveal, and has been eyeing projects in Singapore, Japan, Denmark and the Middle East.

“We’ll be taking people on a journey through some of the best places in the world, that’s our ambition,” Thomas said. “It will hopefully end up making commercial real estate as sexy as residential.

“I’m a big fan of Grand Designs but sometimes the houses can be quite underwhelming. Commercial properties can be much better and it’s fascinating to watch it as it happens and see the challenges and how they’re met.”

News of the shows has already been warmly welcomed by the commercial property industry. Amanda Steele, the executive managing director of CBRE Asia’s asset services business, is a big fan – as well as the presenter and interviewer on the show.

“This is so exciting!” she said. “It’s fascinating how much commercial real estate innovation and design really informs residential, for example when we look at the demand for industrial-style warehouse housing, or the focus on environmental sustainability and wellness. We did those first.

“Australians, especially, love a transformation and a reveal, and we have so much of that on a large scale in commercial, and now they’ll have the chance to see behind the scenes as well. I think people will love seeing other people’s workplaces, and that might end up driving the demand for something nicer for themselves.”

Brookfield Properties has the 43-storey, 65,500-square-metre, A-grade office tower at 405 Bourke Street in Melbourne – with premium-grade services – as well as Brookfield Place Sydney at Wynyard, a 27-level office tower with 59,000-square-metres of space. Both were finished in 2021.

Mathew Chandler, Brookfield’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, said the developers of commercial property used to produce big “tombstone” picture books of their developments that sat on coffee tables and were never read. “But this kind of story-telling is a much better way to engage audiences,” he said.

“It’s great to think that visitors coming to Australia, sitting on a plane, will now be seeing different views of our cities and learning about extraordinary things that tourists would never have thought to find out about before. It will open up our cities to them and, really, they’re much more likely to be around our CBDs and buildings than to experience residential homes.”

There have been a few TV documentary-style programs that have strayed into the area, like Megastructures, Modern Marvels and Extreme Engineering, but they’ve tended to find audiences of mostly engineers or those in the industry. This is the first major attempt to woo a regular following for commercial property among general viewers.

Thomas has dipped his toe into the waters before, having produced two-minute stories on Australian projects that ran as interstitials on Qantas in 2015. In 2017, he expanded them into a TV show, The Placemakers, that ran on Channel 9.

He’s looking to set up pre-production and production capabilities in Singapore, Japan and India but plans to keep post-production and distribution in Australia.

“These are such great stories to tell,” said Murray Middleton, head of development at AMP Capital, which developed the eye-catching 50-storey Quay Quarter Tower at Circular Quay with its 88,000-square-metre-plus of space. “It’s an amazing building of changing volumes and it changes the office tower typology and creates new workplaces and is a great story of reuse and transformation.

“It’s nice to see the project recognised and rewarded on film. The series on city-making provides great insights into how long it takes and all the different challenges you need to work through to create extraordinary outcomes.”

One of the delightful – and most surprising – things about the show is that it’s being greeted with such enthusiasm by the industry, Thomas said.