What geopolitical uncertainty means for property

The biggest risks facing property may not be the ones showing up in today’s feasibility models. Dr Merriden Varrall challenged delegates at The Property Conference to look beyond immediate disruption and consider the deeper systems businesses depend on.

The Property Conference 2026 brought together property leaders, investors, innovators and decision-makers to explore Markets, Maturity, and Momentum and the forces shaping property across Australasia and beyond.

Opening the three-day programme, geopolitical strategist Dr Merriden Varrall offered a perspective that reached well beyond geopolitics itself.

The system businesses operate within is changing, and managing individual disruptions will not be enough.

For an industry making investment decisions over decades, that raises a bigger question: how do we build businesses and assets that can continue to function when the systems around them change?

The system is changing

Technology, Merriden argued, is becoming increasingly bound up with political power and control. Technological capability is no longer simply a driver of productivity or innovation. It is increasingly connected to strategic advantage, influence and national power.

At the same time, businesses are operating amid greater competition between major powers, changing alliances, shifting trade relationships and increasingly complex global supply chains. The challenge is that these aren’t necessarily risks that can be managed through traditional crisis planning.

“The system itself is changing,” Merriden said, arguing that no amount of crisis management can fully address a level of change that alters the assumptions businesses have built their strategies around. That distinction matters.
A business can prepare for a temporary supply interruption. It is harder to prepare when the underlying conditions determining where products come from, how capital moves, what technology is available or how markets interact are themselves evolving.

For property, where decisions are often made with long time horizons, understanding those structural shifts becomes increasingly important.

For property, risk isn't just about price

Property businesses are accustomed to thinking about risk through numbers. What will the land cost? What will construction cost? What will interest rates do? What return can the project generate? But Merriden offered another lens: moving from prices to permissions. The question is not simply what an asset costs. It is whether you have the permission and ability to use that asset in the way you need to.

Can it be financed?
Can it be insured?
Can it be developed?
Can it access the infrastructure and services it depends on?
Can the materials, technology and people required to operate it still be accessed?

These questions introduce another dimension to property risk. An asset may remain commercially attractive on paper, but changes in the systems around it can affect whether that business case can actually be realised. This is where geopolitical uncertainty becomes much less abstract.

A geopolitical event does not have to happen in New Zealand to have an impact here. A change in global trade, capital flows, technology access or supply chains can ultimately filter through to the decisions being made by property businesses in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or anywhere in between.

Know your ball bearings

So what does resilience look like when the disruption cannot be predicted?

Understand what is critical to keeping your business working and identify the external systems you rely on.

Think about the seemingly small components that keep the larger machine moving: the suppliers, systems, technologies, infrastructure, financing arrangements and relationships that are easy to take for granted when everything is functioning normally. These are your business’s “ball bearings”. The important question is what happens if one of them stops working.

Do you have another supplier?
Another route to market?
Another way to finance or insure an asset?
An alternative technology or operational process?

Those alternatives may cost more. They may take longer. But having considered them before a disruption occurs can be the difference between having an option and having a crisis.

Resilience is not necessarily about having the cheapest or most efficient system. Sometimes it is about having another system available when the first one fails. That is a useful challenge for an industry that has spent years optimising around efficiency, cost and certainty.

Look beyond New Zealand

Merriden’s keynote also highlighted the importance of looking beyond our own borders. The pressures facing Australia and New Zealand may take different forms, but many are driven by the same underlying shifts. And for two economies with such close connections, what happens in one market can have consequences in the other.

The decision to bring The Property Conference to Sydney this year provided its own reminder of that interconnectedness. Capital, businesses, supply chains, investment and people move across the Tasman. The operating environment for New Zealand property is therefore shaped by developments well beyond our own borders.

“We’re stronger together,” Merriden said of Australia and New Zealand. For the property sector, that means maintaining a regional perspective matters. It also means recognising that resilience is not only an individual business issue.

Resilience is a system issue too

Some risks can be managed within an individual business, others cannot. Infrastructure, planning settings, housing supply, construction capacity, energy, access to capital and regulatory frameworks all form part of the wider system in which property operates. If those systems become more constrained or unpredictable, the implications extend across the sector.

That makes the resilience conversation bigger than individual contingency plans. It is also about understanding the dependencies that exist across the property ecosystem and building the capacity to respond when those dependencies come under pressure. For an industry with such long investment horizons, that may be one of the most important shifts in thinking.

The property sector has always had to price uncertainty. Increasingly, it may also need to understand permission: the ability to finance, insure, develop and operate assets in a world where the systems around them are changing.

The questions coming out of Merriden’s keynote are therefore deceptively simple:
What are we dependent on?
What could change?
And if it does, what options do we have?

Those questions may be more useful than trying to predict what happens next.

Opening keynote announced for Residential Development Summit 2027