Ann: WHSP 2023 AGM Presentation, page-14

I'd like to give a bit more of a nuanced take on that one.

I was also a shareholder in URB (from around 6 months after the IPO) which was definitely disappointing but at the time of the float it was quite an intriguing concept to hold both property and shares in the same LIC particularly considering SOL was doing quite a bit in the direct property space at that time and this was pitched as a way for retail investors to get exposure to those deals (SOL coinvested with URB on three "seed" properties that went into the fund as well as owning around 10 percent of URB itself).

I think where it went wrong in practice was not raising anywhere near enough money at the IPO which made them too small to pursue any further property deals and get a bit of a production line going (the majority of LIC investors want to receive a good income straight away and aren't used of having to wait for the council to approve a subdivision with all the red tape that entails) and to me the public equities portion of the portfolio always felt a bit loosely cobbled together around the theme of urban renewal.

Off memory there was also double layering off fees whereby Pitt Street Real Estate (the SOL property arm) were taking commissions on the property deals plus the fund manager was then getting a management fee on the value of those properties plus the equity portfolio.

I more see it as a bit of an experiment that didn't work out rather than something that permanently tainted my view of Contact or changed my opinion on Tom as a potential SOL chairman.

I would recommend listening to him on one of the podcast interviews he's done as he always come across well and clearly has the old school SOL value investing framework in mind.

Something else to think about as SOL expands and becomes less of a family business is the BKW cross shareholding. I got the sense from one of Todd Barlow's answers today that we may see some kind of strategic action taken in the future to attempt to close the big discounted to inferred asset value. Considering it's at around 30% at the moment just bringing it up to around parity would result in a 1.1 billion dollar gain for SOL.