The biggest advice gap in Australian wealth sits on the land

City wealth managers have spent decades competing for the same executive clients. Australian agricultural wealth management, by contrast, has barely registered as a discipline.

Meanwhile, a different kind of wealth has been quietly building across 387 million hectares of Australian agricultural land.

Farmland values have nearly tripled since 2010, reaching a record national median at the end of 2025. A significant portion of that wealth is now approaching a generational handover as landholders age. Much of it is illiquid, tied to soil and seasons.

Almost none of it is properly advised.

That is the gap Troy Armstrong has launched Larapinta Private to fill.

Larapinta Private builds entirely for Australia’s regional, agricultural and pastoral families: landholding families whose balance sheets look nothing like the portfolios major wealth firms are designed to manage.

Armstrong spent years inside Australia’s major financial institutions and most recently at Koda Capital before concluding that no existing firm served the clients he wanted to reach.

“There is enormous wealth tied up in the land in this country, and almost no one advises it properly.”

Established wealth firms, he argues, calibrate for city executives. They build around boardroom relationships, quarterly review cycles and conversations geared to share portfolios, superannuation and the family home.

None of these map onto the reality of a farming family managing seasonal cashflow swings, illiquid assets and operating risk that shifts with the weather.

“For these families, seasonal cashflow, illiquid balance sheets and operating risk are the starting point,” Armstrong said. “A good season and a drought year call for very different plans.”

A new approach to Australian agricultural wealth management

The scale of the opportunity makes the advice gap all the more striking. According to figures from Bendigo Bank Agribusiness and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), farmland values have nearly tripled since 2010.

Yet as land values have surged and landholders have aged, the profession has largely looked the other way. Armstrong sees a structural mismatch at the heart of Australian agricultural wealth management, not just an underserved segment.

Larapinta Private occupies the space between the large institutions that cannot serve these families and the local accountant who cannot scale the advice they need.

The firm brings institutional investment capability to relationships that require something institutions rarely offer. It is the willingness to travel well beyond the city to meet clients on their own properties.

“The investment capability is institutional. The relationship is personal,” Armstrong said. “Most wealth firms ask a family to choose between the two.

I built Larapinta because the firm I wanted for these families didn’t exist. I will make the long drive or the flight to a remote property, because that is where deep conversations happen and real trust is built.”

The firm’s Foundation and Conviction framework combines a long-hold, broadly diversified strategic core with modest and time-bound high-conviction allocations. The firm sizes a treasury sleeve to each family’s drawdown rhythm. Larapinta Private holds no proprietary products and takes no commission income.

The hardest conversation on the land

Succession sits at the centre of the firm’s work. Armstrong describes it as the issue that weighs most heavily on the families he meets, and it is easy to see why.

As landholders age and land values continue to rise, passing on a property across multiple heirs without forcing a sale or fracturing what took generations to build grows both financially and emotionally complex.

“The hardest conversation on the land is rarely about returns,” Armstrong said. “It is about who takes over, and how you keep the place whole and fair across the next generation and then how to manage the day-to-day wealth when that liquidity event arrives. That is the work I care most about.”

The firm works alongside families’ existing professional advisers, aiming to plan the handover before it becomes a crisis. Armstrong is also clear that families should not have to sell to access the wealth they have spent a lifetime building.

“Most of these families have spent a lifetime building something on the land. My job is to build lasting wealth from that, without them having to give up the place to do it.”

A name built for the long game

Larapinta Private’s name comes from one of the oldest river systems in Australia, a deliberate signal of permanence. It reflects the philosophy behind everything Armstrong has built: patient, long-term investment management for clients who measure time in seasons and generations, not quarters.

Many landholders approaching retirement carry wealth they cannot simply sell, distribute or restructure without fracturing what took generations to build.

The succession question, how to keep the place whole and pass it on fairly, is not a planning exercise for these families. It is the defining challenge of their financial lives.

Armstrong says the firm invests with a long horizon, not chasing short-term performance, but stewarding wealth that needs to last across generations.

In a field as underserved as Australian agricultural wealth management, most wealth managers lack the credibility to make that commitment to a family whose net worth is tied to a drought-prone property in outback Australia.

Armstrong has spent his career building to the point where he can.

“The families I work with are not looking for another name on a city tower,” he said. “They want an adviser who understands life on the land and will be there for the long term. That is the firm I set out to build.”