Goodman, gazillionaires' factory

A wise man once said that real estate is "that rare place in the service economy where you can score a white-collar salary with a blue-collar education. It's the easiest game in town".

When I die, I want to come back as a Goodman Group executive. The industrial property giant pays its people more than any other major Australian company. Macquarie is supposed to be the millionaires' factory, but in 2025, the average compensation per person across Macquarie's 20,000-strong workforce was a meagre $381,664. Goodman's average pay for its 1,030 employees was $621,359 per head.[[Bear in mind, this is average pay after accounting for all of the shit-kickers answering phones or fetching dry cleaning for Goodman's and Macquarie's legions of Patrick Batemans. If you excluded the help, average pay would be way higher.]]

Unlike Macquarie, Goodman excludes the majority of its remuneration expenses from its principal profitability metric, "operating profit," by excluding all share-based compensation. The majority of Goodman's staff compensation is paid in Goodman shares.[[In 2025, Goodman employees received $284 million in cash and $356 million in shares. In 2024, it was $273 million in cash and $501 million in shares.]] Goodman justifies this exotic accounting by defining operating profit as a measure of "cash-aligned" or cash-backed" earnings, which for purity's sake cannot bear the impact of any non-cash expenses.[["The board believes that managing the business on what is primarily a cash profit basis is the strongest determinant of value creation for securityholders over time," Goodman's 2025 annual report states.]]