CJAM Group Founder Craig McDermott Proves the Most Profitable Build Is Sometimes the One You Don’t Start

A former motel, a three-year approval battle and an unsolicited offer that arrived weeks before demolition. The deal says as much about the state of regional development as it does about the company that walked away from building.

Australia’s regional property markets have spent the past two years attracting a category of developer they rarely used to see: city-based operators chasing yield in corridors where land is cheaper, councils are smaller and the competition is thinner. Southeast Queensland, the New South Wales north coast and pockets of regional Victoria have all drawn new entrants, many of whom arrived with capital, ambition and limited experience navigating the regulatory and construction realities of building outside a major metro.

The results have been mixed. Council approval timelines in regional local government areas can stretch well beyond what developers accustomed to metropolitan planning departments expect. Operational works fees vary dramatically between states. Labour availability remains constrained in towns where a single large project can absorb the entire local trades workforce for months. For developers who mispriced these variables on entry, the past 18 months have involved either selling at a loss, pausing indefinitely or pushing forward into margins that no longer justify the risk.

It is against this backdrop that one of the more instructive recent transactions in the regional development space took place, not because it involved a spectacular build, but because it involved the decision not to build at all.


Craig McDermott

In late March 2026, Craig McDermott completed the sale of a development site in Ballina, New South Wales, for $9 million. CJAM Group, the southeast Queensland–based development company Craig McDermott founded in 2019, had acquired the property — a former motel for $3.8 million and spent nearly three years securing a development approval for 28 pop-top shops, a townhouse-plus-commercial format combining residential living with rentable work-from-home spaces. The site was fully fenced and weeks from demolition when an unsolicited approach from a large automotive dealership group resulted in a deal closed entirely on the seller’s terms: $9 million, 30-day settlement, no cooling-off period, deposit released on signing.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Craig McDermott more than doubled the capital deployed without pouring a single footing. But the rationale behind accepting the offer, rather than proceeding with a development that had already cleared the planning hurdle most developers dread, is more revealing than the numbers alone.

“It wasn’t really our core business,” Craig McDermott says. “Northern New South Wales is a difficult place to develop. The councils are extremely slow and expensive — their operational works fees run at about three times Queensland. We put offers in on two other projects the same week we sold. We’ve got plenty to get on with.”

CJAM Group’s target market is the $650,000 to $1 million price bracket. New homes designed for owner-occupiers and investors in regional Queensland. The Ballina project, with individual units priced between $1.75 million and $2 million, sat well outside that range. For a developer whose operational model is built around volume, speed and repeatable product, the strategic case for proceeding was weak — regardless of the margin on paper.

This is a distinction that separates experienced operators from aspirational ones in the current market. The temptation to hold an approved site and build into a rising market is considerable, particularly when the approval itself represents years of sunk cost in time and fees. Walking away from that approval requires a level of discipline that many developers — particularly those still building their track record — struggle to exercise.

Craig McDermott’s track record, however, extends well beyond property. Before entering development, Craig McDermott was one of Australia’s most accomplished fast bowlers, representing the country in 71 Test matches between 1984 and 1996 and claiming 291 wickets at an average of 28.63. He was the leading wicket-taker at the 1987 Cricket World Cup, where a five-wicket haul in the semi-final against Pakistan helped deliver Australia the title. Craig McDermott later served as bowling coach for the Australian national team.

The transition from elite sport to property development is not uncommon in Australia, though the outcomes vary widely. What Craig McDermott appears to have carried across is an operational temperament: read the conditions, commit to a plan and execute without sentiment. The Ballina sale, recognising that an unsolicited offer exceeded the risk-adjusted return of building, and closing on aggressive terms within days is consistent with how Craig McDermott describes his broader investment philosophy: know what your business does well, know what it does not, and deploy capital where the fundamentals are strongest.

CJAM Group now reports a pipeline spanning multiple southeast Queensland markets, with active projects in Toowoomba and Hervey Bay built around a modular production-facility construction model where homes are completed indoors within six to eight weeks and transported to site. The company has been approved for an Australian Financial Services Licence — a signal that Craig McDermott may be positioning the company for a broader capital-raising or investor-facing model.

Whether the modular approach can scale profitably beyond its current footprint remains to be seen. Production-facility construction carries its own capital intensity and logistics complexity, and CJAM Group’s model has not yet been tested at the volumes where those pressures tend to surface. But the Ballina transaction offers at least one data point worth noting: in a market where many developers are learning the cost of overextension, the ones exercising discipline — even when it means walking away from an approved site, may be better positioned for what comes next.