Dad was a pharmacist. He made his money in property.
Every weekend of my childhood, I was in the back of the car while Mum did the rounds — Nedlands, Subiaco, Inglewood, South Perth — collecting rent from an endless run of one-bedroom flats. I didn't think of it as education. I thought of it as being bored into next week.
But the lessons went in anyway. Use other people's money to make money. Good debt versus bad debt. Rate of return. Cash is king. I could recite the grammar of property investment a decade before I could drive, and I never once thought about it, because I was the creative kid. I was going to be as far from receipt books and classified listings as it was possible for a Perth boy to get.
Until I wasn't.
Twenty-five years ago, my father-in-law, a real estate agent, became one of Block's first clients — not because it was strategic, but because he was there and we needed the work. Not long after, a pair of apartment developers calling themselves Match came knocking. They couldn't quite articulate what they wanted, but it turned out to be something the property industry here had never really bothered with: a brand.
That's when the two halves of my childhood met properly for the first time. I kept asking the same question and nobody had a good answer for it. Why hadn't property been treated as a real branding category? Why was every apartment block sold exactly the way the last one was sold — a floor plan, a render, a "resort lifestyle" starburst — as if the building had no more identity than a parking space? Why weren't these entrepreneurs building anything that outlasted the sale?
Here's what I've come to think the answer actually is. The specialist-versus-generalist debate has always assumed there's one axis running through a business, and you have to pick a point on that spectrum. But there are two axes, not one, and they're doing different jobs. There's your discipline — the craft itself, the thing you're actually good at — and there's your market — who you apply that craft to. For Block, the discipline is branding, marketing, creative services, and it doesn't change. The market does. Property. Retail. A city three time zones away.
That's the part the old debate never had a word for. Ambidextrous. One hand holds the craft -constant, never put down. The other hand is specialist too, but interchangeable: it picks up whichever market the moment calls for, then lets go when the moment passes. Not a compromise between specialist and generalist. Both, at once, doing different work.
Every small or medium business in a market this size is living this same tension, named or not. Too narrow on the craft and you starve — there aren't enough customers in the 6000s who want exactly your one brilliant thing. Too broad and you're forgettable, competent at everything, remarkable at nothing. Most businesses that fail here didn't pick the wrong side. They never noticed there were two sides to pick from.
Why does this matter now, specifically, rather than twenty years ago when the property specialism was already sitting there? Because artificial intelligence has just made the appearance of specialism free. Anyone can prompt the veneer of market expertise out of a laptop and an afternoon; the language of it, the confident jargon, the look of depth. What the tools can't generate is the thing underneath: years actually spent in a market, learning where the bodies are buried and why the last three attempts failed. That kind of depth was always rare. Now it's the only thing left that's rare, because the fake version is available to everyone.
Which is why we're naming the specialist hand now, not leaving it unnamed the way we did for twenty years. (Vacant)Block works with property and place professionals to position assets and destinations — the specialism I picked up by accident in the back of a car, decades before I knew what to do with it. (Eastern)Block is the same instinct aimed at a market three time zones away. (Shopping)Block and (Creative)Block are coming for the same reason: the discipline hand stays exactly where it is, and the specialist hand keeps reaching for whatever the market has just made valuable.
None of these are separate businesses bolted onto Block. They're what one hand looks like when it keeps changing what it's holding, while the other hand never lets go of what it's actually for.
You don't choose between specialist and generalist. You use both hands. You always have. AI has just made it stupid to pretend otherwise.
By Mark Braddock - Block Branding
