Peter Holland, the director of international property economics at Urbis, has been tapped to organize ULI in Australia. Holland works with a wide range of clients in mature and emerging markets for Urbis, a professional consulting firm operating in Australia, Asia, and the Middle East. Recently, he sat down with Urban Land contributor Lew Sichelman to discuss his plans to build ULI’s presence in the country.

You’ve been asked to be chairman for ULI Australia, which will become part of ULI South Asia. How far along is the effort?

We are still in the initial planning stages. We’ve been discussing this idea about Australia becoming part of ULI South Asia for about a year. Now we are trying to determine if there’s enough interest there to do it. We already have a base of 100-some members in Australia. We have our publications, but not much more. There hasn’t been a lot of interaction between ULI and Australia itself. You have to remember, we are very remote and distant from the U.S. But we think there is certainly potential for increasing the membership base in Australia…

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