Luke Billiau and the art of putting a price on tomorrow

Luke Billiau’s photograph of a CEO handover has a pleasing lack of ceremony. He is close to the camera, wearing a headset microphone, with a roomful of colleagues behind him. There are exposed ceiling services, rows of chairs and faces stretching towards the windows. For someone whose work involves putting commercial buildings in front of investors, it is an unusually useful picture: the people have almost entirely obscured the property.

He shared it in May 2026 after hosting JLL’s Australia and New Zealand town hall to welcome incoming CEO Selina Short. He had spent eight months as interim CEO. His account of the experience was candid: “It pushed me personally and professionally.” He thanked his team, clients and Emily Billiau for her support. Then his attention returned to capital markets and the pace at which they were moving.

That handover supplies a revealing place to begin. Billiau’s career has expanded from individual valuations to state leadership, national office investments and a business spanning two countries. The through-line is a practical one: working out what an asset can offer, and getting other people to trust the assessment. A handsome building can secure the first meeting. It cannot answer every question raised in the second.

Before the sale, the valuation

His professional starting point was Brisbane. He joined JLL in 2007, the year his listed studies at Queensland University of Technology ended. By 2013, a valuation letter included in an ASX-filed prospectus carried his name as a director in JLL’s Queensland Valuations and Advisory division. Beside it were the letters AAPI and his certification as a practising valuer. It is an early glimpse of a career built around having a number that could withstand scrutiny.

Over eight years, his valuation work covered institutional commercial offices and the different reasons somebody needs to know their worth: financial reporting, acquisition, disposal, mortgage security and investment. The same building can arrive on a desk attached to very different decisions. A purchaser wants to understand what lies ahead. A lender needs to assess the security. An owner has accounts to prepare. The valuation has to be useful beyond the person who commissioned it.

That background offers a way to read his later work. Commercial property has an extensive vocabulary for uncertainty, some of it disguised as abbreviations. Billiau began in the part of the business required to make assumptions explicit. His subsequent move into transactions brought those assessments into negotiations, where somebody on the other side of the table is entirely free to disagree.

Brisbane was more than a starting address

Before the move south, he became a senior director in Queensland’s capital markets team. The transactions associated with that chapter include 400 George Street and 80 Ann Street, both cited when his New South Wales promotion was announced in October 2019. His public writing from the Brisbane years is often wonderfully literal: buildings, addresses, prices, sold. The titles leave very little room for suspense.

One July 2017 article announced the sale of 120 Edward Street for A$142.65 million. Earlier that year came posts about the Nexus Centre in Upper Mount Gravatt and 164 Grey Street in South Brisbane. Seb Turnbull appears alongside him in several announcements. Even in a profile about one person, the repeated names are a useful correction to the fantasy of the solitary dealmaker.

Billiau relocated to Sydney in late 2019 to lead capital markets in New South Wales. He would also lead office investments nationally. The progression connected his Queensland experience with a larger pool of buildings, clients and capital. Sydney supplied a different address book; the work still depended on understanding the asset well enough to explain why someone should buy it.

A bigger remit, with the numbers kept in proportion

In May 2023, he was appointed Head of Capital Markets for Australia and New Zealand. The role put him in charge of an Australian team of more than 140 professionals, covering offices, retail, logistics, living and alternative assets. It was a considerable widening of the brief for someone whose transaction specialism had been commercial offices.

His deal history includes involvement in Grosvenor Place in Sydney, with a sale value of A$925 million listed in his professional biography. The important word is involvement. These are transactions conducted by teams, frequently alongside other agencies, for clients who own the assets. Their prices describe the property changing hands. They are neither personal earnings nor a measure of the broker’s wealth.

Consider 255 George Street. In April 2024, Billiau announced the sale of Mirvac’s 50 per cent interest to Keppel REIT for A$363.8 million, in conjunction with Cushman & Wakefield. The distinction between half a building’s ownership and the whole building matters rather a lot at that price. His announcement also pointed to roughly A$50 million in recent upgrades. A transaction story contains a maintenance story, if you read far enough.

The office market refused to be one story

Billiau’s public commentary is more specific than a blanket vote of confidence in offices. In October 2024, he described Sydney as investors’ preferred destination, followed by increasing activity in Brisbane, while uncertainty persisted around Melbourne. “Sydney is the preference,” he said. The geographical distinctions were doing real work. An office market is a collection of places, occupiers and buildings, however convenient a national headline might be.

The figures accompanying that assessment showed Australian office sales of A$6.1 billion in the first nine months of 2024, up 61 per cent on the comparable period. Billiau also pointed to the resilience of office investment income. Those were observations about a particular moment in the cycle, rather than an assurance that every office would recover on the same schedule.

By the end of that year, he was thanking clients for A$1.6 billion of institutional office transactions delivered by the team. The larger national sales figure and his team’s figure describe different things. Keeping them separate gives a clearer picture of his job: he participates in a market whose direction he must also interpret for clients.

“Sydney is the preference.”

Luke Billiau / October 2024

Who gets a place at the table?

As his responsibilities widened, the people doing the work became a more visible part of his public brief. In November 2023, JLL appointed Jack Bergin to head its Australian living-sector capital markets business. Bergin brought experience from London’s build-to-rent market. Billiau emphasised the usefulness of that experience for Australian clients examining acquisitions, disposals and transaction structures in an emerging sector.

There was another question inside the brokerage business: who gets the opportunity to build those careers? In November 2024, JLL’s Women in Property Transactions network marked its first anniversary. Founded by female brokers, it was developing mentoring, training and feedback sessions intended to support women in fee-earning positions and their progression into senior roles.

Billiau publicly backed that ambition, including changes to policies and programmes intended to retain women and bring more into the business. The initiative belongs to its founders and participants. His involvement places a leadership commitment beside the more familiar transaction announcements. A brokerage can recruit for the next deal while also examining who will be able to stay for the next decade.

The Property Council’s 2025 capital transactions and leasing masterclass handbook adds a practical detail. It lists Billiau with Tim O’Connor as hosts for a session on developing a brokerage career, covering market understanding, client relationships, communication and negotiation. After all the money and square metres, the syllabus comes back to learning how to talk to people.

Then the roof joined the conversation

By April 2026, his public work was addressing a further change in what a building might do. In a discussion about Australia’s energy expansion, Billiau examined the overlap between property and energy infrastructure. Rooftops, land access and the proximity of data centres to logistics property all featured. A building’s potential usefulness was extending beyond the space inside its walls.

He described sustainability as “becoming a market requirement”. In that framing, a property’s environmental performance enters the conversation through tenants’ requirements and the asset’s ability to remain relevant. His contribution also connected agribusiness land with renewable projects and transmission easements. The familiar property questions about location and access were acquiring another set of users.

For a former valuer, it is an apt subject. New uses require new questions about income, cost and the agreements that make either possible. The roof, long accustomed to keeping the weather out, has acquired a more demanding job description. Billiau’s attention to the intersection shows how far the discussion can travel from the conventional office sale.

Back to the room

Selina Short’s CEO appointment took effect on 11 May 2026, returning Billiau to his full-time capital markets position. At the handover, JLL thanked him for maintaining stability for its teams and clients. His own reflection gave the assignment a more personal dimension: pride in what colleagues had achieved together, gratitude for support, and enthusiasm for the work ahead.

The town-hall photograph holds those strands together without requiring a ceremonial backdrop. Here is a property executive whose career began with assessing assets, looking back towards the people who helped him run a business. His next transaction will have its own address and its own price. The harder, continuing task is earning enough confidence for people to act on both.