Peter Barge (pictured left), recipient of HICAP’s Trailblazer Award for 2009, considers his greatest skill to be “the ability to identify talent, getting them to join me and mentoring and keeping them”.

“If you hire smarter people, you get the benefit of that. They make you look good,” he told the audience during the HICAP Southeast Asia Update conference when he received the award.

Barge, who is currently chairman of JLL Asia Pacific, also thanked his wife for his support through his diverse career that took from hotel operations to hotel real estate. “We moved nine times, that’s tough work.”

It’s hard to place the lanky Barge in a box. Not that you would want to. Barge moves at ease through big crowds, yet he is equally at ease on a one-on-one. That’s a talent.

Observing him at social events and industry conferences, you can tell that’s because Barge is a man at ease with himself and what he has achieved, and his staff clearly love him.

In a hard-nosed, number-crunching industry such as real estate, where it’s often about the property, not the people, that’s a rare feat to achieve. So if there was one box I’d put Barge in, it’d be “people’s man”.

Tony South, chief development officer for InterContinental Hotels Asia Pacific, who presented the award, had other words to describe him, among them, “teacher, hotelier, pig farmer, permaculturist, meditator, author, food and wine appreciator and general all round good bloke.”

Barge started his hotel career in the 1970s, working in operations, kitchens and food and beverage. And one thing hotel operations taught him was “the skill to deal with people”.

“That’s the most fundamental skill you need in everything you do and hotels teach you that,” said Barge. “That’s why people coming out of hospitality are so sought after.”

To be a good mentor, he said, one has to be interested in people. “People like people who like them – they are more responsive to you then. It is not a formal process but a two-way street – you learn from each other. Sincerity is a hard thing to fake.”

With real estate, he said, “you can fake sincerity but you can’t fool people”.

Moving from hospitality to real estate was easy, he said and in fact, he has tended to hire people with hotel background to work in JLL Hotels. “You can teach a hotel professional real estate but you can’t teach a real estate person hospitality.”

Recalling his hotel days, Barge related an incident when he was duty manager at a hotel. “A 30-year-old lady came out of the lift, screaming like I had never heard before. She told me she had gotten into the lift with her four-year-old son, the lift didn’t stop but when she got out of the lift, her son wasn’t there.

“I told her that was impossible.”

But as it turned out, the lift, not complying with safety regulations, had a little compartment at the back and the boy had climbed into the space without his mother’s knowledge. “That’s what happens when you don’t follow safety regulations,” he laughed.

Entrepreneur would be another word to describe Barge, who started early. At age 10, he was supplementing his pocket money with the proceeds of two businesses, one breeding mice and another growing silkworms.

In 1979, after a few years of academia where he taught at the Regency Park Food School, he set out with like-minded mates to build “Hotels, Restaurants & Clubs” (HRC), which offered services such as hospitality consulting, kitchen and bar design, manufacturing computerized point‐of‐sale terminals, and software development.

“Nobody can manage me, I realised, and so starting my own business is one way of solving that,” he said.

Barge’s career, which took him to the US, back to Australia and then to Singapore, also seems to have been about forming and keeping longterm relationships, and being at the right place at the right time.

South first met Barge in 1983 and soon the two had formed a consulting joint venture Horwath HRC Services. The partnership worked well and “such was mine and my partners’ respect for Peter, a non accountant we actually made him a partner of the firm (Laventhol & Horwath then), an action prohibited by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in those pre enlightenment days.”

In 1987, Barge retired from Horwath to join Colliers Hotel & Leisure where he, with two mates, Bill Cross and Stephen Burt, set new records in transactions.

“Notable in that period were the sale of Southern Pacific Hotel Corporation from Tan Sri Khoo Teck Puat to the Pritzker family and Adrian Zecha for the then very large amount of A$540 million. That deal completed in 1988 and Peter, Bill and Stephen were well on their way to further great successes, including Peter’s sale of the Westpac (then reportedly Australia’s largest hotel owner – you’ll all be aware Westpac is a bank!) portfolio to Singapore’s Thakral family for A$263 million,” said South.

In 1990, Peter made his first move to the US to run TransAct and more successes followed. Through Barge and his team, Jones Lang Wootton saw the opportunity to expand and JLW TransAct (which later became JLL Hotels) arrived on the scene.

Right: Peter Barge, the pig farmer

In 1994, Barge moved to Singapore from Sydney and became CEO of JLL Hotels. In 1997/98, he attempted his first retirement and while remaining connected to the business, he started raising award winning cattle and miniature pig on his 70-acre Wallaby Hill Farm. He named the pigs after his JLL Hotels staff until he was told that some folks in the region might not find it particularly pleasing to have a pig named after them.

Barge was however not ready to hang up his boots yet and returned to work. By 2003, he was named CEO of JLL Asia Pacific overseeing the entire business operation across the region with more than 14,000 employees and 50 offices in 13 countries. He was made chairman in 2009.

Away from hospitality and real estate, Barge is also an author, having penned “The Art of” series, “Little Book of Big Decisions” and “Little Book of Real Estate Terms”.

Two more are in the works, both around areas of real interest to Barge, namely ”trust” and “cross‐cultural management”.

“It’s about leading a full and balanced life,” he said.