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Middle Park: Flybuys inventor Peter Langkamp and wife Kathryn selling Art Nouveau house

Middle Park: Flybuys inventor Peter Langkamp and wife Kathryn selling Art Nouveau house

News.com.au01-05-2025

The Flybuys retail program's inventor Peter Langkamp and his wife Kathryn are selling their Middle Park house with $4.1m-$4.3m price hopes.
In the 1990s, Mr Langkamp conceived of and launched the customer loyalty card at conglomerate Wesfarmers.
Flybuys is still used today by more than 9 million customers across stores including Bunnings, Coles, Target, Kmart and Officeworks.
T2 co-founder Maryanne Shearer puts waterfront Middle Park home up for sale
Mr Langkamp has also worked at the National Disability Insurance Agency, Shell Australia, NRMA, Bendigo Bank and Accenture.
He's now the director of healthy advocacy organisations genU, The Disability Trust and ermha365.
Jellis Craig Port Phillip director Warwick Gardiner declined to comment on the four-bedroom home's owners but records show it is owned by the Langkamps.
Set on a 408sq m block at 100 Wright St, the Art Nouveau-style abode boasts historic elements such as stained glass windows, decorative ceilings, marble fireplaces, tessellated tiles and a bay window in the formal lounge room.
'It's a pretty rare offering, it's in a blue-chip location and is a red-brick Edwardian consisting of original period features in the front half of the house,' Mr Gardiner said.
'The home is about 100m to the shoreline of Middle Park beach, which is one of the main attractions.'
An outdoor commercial-grade kitchen with three-phase power is part of the entertaining-set up.
The house was renovated 25 to 30 years ago, with the bathrooms upgraded about a decade ago.
A studio bedroom suite upstairs with an ensuite, kitchenette, storage spaces and a balcony was added during the reno.
'It is unusual to have that amount of space in an older house,' Mr Gardiner said.
He's expecting buyers including local families and downsizers.
'The buyer will probably end up spending a couple of million on renovating as with that block size, which is quite large for Middle Park, it would be impossible to overcapitalise,' he said.
The abode will be auctioned at 10.30am on May 17.

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In theory, this would mean finding the blend of risky assets with the best volatility-adjusted return, and comparing it with the 'safe' return on inflation-protected government bonds. You would then solve for an optimal split between the two, which would vary with market conditions. Thankfully, far simpler procedures can produce spectacular results. Our putative 20th-centurymaires just plonked everything in America's stockmarket, and did very well. Today, we know they could have done even better without much more effort. A simple rule-of-thumb known as the 'Merton share' can approximate the optimal split between stocks and inflation-protected government bonds, by comparing their expected returns and volatility. Messrs Haghani and White have calculated the annualised returns on such a strategy since 1900 (using a proxy for inflation-linked bonds for before 1997, when they were first issued). Had the Gilded Age crowd and their descendants invested in this manner, they would have scored an annualised real return of 10 per cent, compared with 6.6 per cent from the all-stock strategy. Remarkably, it would also have been 40 per cent less volatile. That would have produced vastly more old-money billionaires today. The worse news is that deciding how much to spend is trickier than it sounds. Popular rules for drawing down retirement savings, such as spending a largish fixed percentage of the initial value each year, are definitely out. In truth, these are not wise even for pensioners. Suppose you had kept a classic 60/40 split between American stocks and government bonds, starting in 2000, and drawn down 5 per cent of the value of your initial savings a year. You would have run out of money in 2019, despite earning an annualised return of 5.25 per cent, since you would have depleted too much capital in the market's 'down' years. Even if you spent only 4 per cent of the initial value each year — well below the portfolio's return — you would run a high risk of going bust. Simulate many different market outcomes, based on the 60/40 portfolio's expected return and volatility, and the 4 per cent spending rule leads to ruin within three decades about a third of the time. To avoid this trap, the optimal amount to spend each year must be a percentage of the portfolio's value at that point (the 'spending ratio'), not of its initial value. In other words, if you want to take the risk required to generate outsize returns, you must vary your (maximum) spending from year to year. That way, after a bad spell for the markets, you will not deplete too much of the remaining pot, allowing it to recover. Each year you could, for example, spend a proportion of the portfolio's value equal to its annualised expected return. This is similar to the spending rule adopted by university endowments, which aim to solve the same problem. The median outcome is that the fund's value, and hence annual spending, stays roughly constant with time (provided you have not been overly optimistic about your returns). Nice — but hardly enough to start a dynasty. Ideally, you want to increase your portfolio's value, which means spending less to let the returns rack up. The trade-offs here are difficult to parse. You will get pleasure (or, in economists' jargon, 'utility') from spending more today, albeit with diminishing marginal returns as you get more and more profligate. Doing so will also trim your descendants' purchasing power, especially if the portfolio has a large expected return, which you in part forgo by spending now. Yet such returns are inherently uncertain. In any case, it is only human to prefer an immediate pay-off to a delayed one ('time preference'). The solution is to plug these dynamics into a mathematical model, simulate possible paths for financial markets and calculate the utility derived from each for a given level of spending. You can then calculate the expected utility for each rule and pick the one that maximises this. Unsurprisingly, the procedure is hard, and generates results that are sensitive to the inputs. Maybe spend some of your money on an excellent financial adviser. Yet there are straightforward lessons that everyone can absorb. Although greater expected returns allow you to spend more, they do not do so by as much as you might think. With higher returns, the gap between these and the optimal spending ratio widens (since there is more value in sacrificing spending to let the portfolio grow). Higher volatility means lower spending, since it drags on your annualised return. The more reluctant you are to vary year-to-year outlays, the less you can tolerate investing in stocks, since their value fluctuates. The smaller your minimum spending requirement, the more risk you can take, meaning your expected returns, and hence your overall spending, can rise. A more important lesson is that making your inheritance last for ever means spending far less than its expected return. Exactly how much less depends on market conditions and your risk and time preference. But under reasonable assumptions, a near-optimal portfolio might have an expected annualised return of 4.1 per cent and an optimal pre-tax spending ratio of 2.4 per cent per year. Even that is before allowing for how much your family tree might grow, cutting whatever you pass on into smaller chunks. 'People often want to know how much they need to have to give each member of their family's next few generations a modest income,' says Mr Haghani. 'The answer is: a lot more than most anyone thinks.'

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