Editor
Michael Gentry
Michael Gentry is the editor of PropertyFacts. He spent two decades sizing markets and pricing risk for institutional capital before he ever wrote a home loan, and this publication exists to point that work at Australian residential property — the country's largest asset class, and the one most often written about without any of it.
He began as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at a global firm in New York, on public, private, public-to-private and activist transactions. He returned to Australia to run a major bank's multi-billion-dollar investment pipeline, then spent years as a management consultant leading operational turnarounds and running commercial due diligence for private equity buyers on transactions into the billions. He then moved from advising on deals to owning the result, building and leading mergers and acquisitions teams inside ASX-listed companies — assessing hundreds of opportunities, completing dozens of acquisitions, and running strategy and transformation for a business turning over billions.
That career ran across mining, ports, aviation, logistics, telecommunications, healthcare and retail, and the same four disciplines decided every one of them: size the market honestly, interrogate the claim before believing it, make the data answer the question actually being asked, and find the insight in it that everyone else walked past. The last one is where the value is. Anyone can read a headline number; deals are won by the person who noticed what it implied and nobody else had bothered to check. An industry changes; none of that does.
Australian property is written about almost entirely without that discipline — advertised prices reported as sale prices, asking rents reported as rents, forecasts published without the assumptions that produced them. Applying ordinary institutional rigour to the largest asset class in the country turns out to be a genuine gap in the market. That is the whole thesis of this site.
He has also carried the risk himself, buying a business out of liquidation, rebuilding it, and exiting through a management buy-out at a strong return. He founded and sold a logistics start-up. He invests in residential, commercial and development property personally.
Since 2025 he has practised as a mortgage broker, writing residential and investment lending — purchases, refinances, construction, bridging, self-managed super fund lending, equity release and the first home buyer schemes. That is the experience this site draws on most directly. Policy is announced in press releases and applied in servicing calculators, and the two are rarely the same thing. Working real files every week is what lets PropertyFacts be specific about the difference.
He sets the subjects covered here, verifies figures against their primary sources, and approves every piece before it is published. His interest in the data on this site is straightforward: most Australian property commentary runs on advertised prices and asking rents, while the bond and valuation records are public, free, and describe what people actually agreed to pay. That gap is why this publication exists.
Writes about
- Mergers, acquisitions and commercial due diligence
- Lender credit policy and servicing assessment
- Property finance structures
- Investor tax settings and holding costs
- First home buyer and shared equity schemes
- Operational and financial transformation
Juris Doctor, College of William & Mary. Bachelor of Science, Queen's University. CFA Levels I and II. Diploma of Finance and Mortgage Broking Management (FNS50322). MFAA full member 620253. Principal of Oryx Capital Pty Ltd (ACN 167 673 878), which publishes this site and trades as Gentry Finance.