“Harold’s success with small blocks of four, six or eight flats led to numerous enquiries from other potential clients wanting to invest. Many of them didn’t have enough funds to develop their own so Harold sought a way of combining resources of several at once. This led him to the original idea of forming investment syndicates capable of funding larger, and therefore more economical projects.” David Krantz
“When I got the idea of building some flats I had very few social contacts. No one was going to come to me and ask me to build a block of flats. They didn’t know what flats were. So, I said to one or two of my clients for whom I built houses and I knew they had a little money, ‘How about building a little block of flats by forming a syndicate?’ I formed such a syndicate and … I used, the economic principles that I used in building the house for myself, in building several blocks of flats in this way by forming syndicates.”
Harold Krantz, Jane Flemming interview, c 1980
Advertisement for Riviera Investments Syndicate, The West Australian, 31 Mar 1936
“As Harold’s reputation for functional, cost-effective buildings increased, many of his clients wanted to invest in them but, as Strata Titles were as yet unknown, they didn’t have enough money to go it alone. To overcome this problem, Harold conceived the idea of forming syndicates of up to 20 investors to build small blocks of flats. Investors would be tenants-in-common on the title deed and they would share all income and expenditure. To minimise risk, borrowings were always kept to less than 50% of overall cost. This approach was extremely successful with the demand for accommodation ensuring an excellent financial return to investors. As a consequence, investment increased as did the size of the projects. Remarkably, over a period of thirty years, more than 90% of the flats in WA were designed in his office!” David Krantz, October 2016
One of the first projects developed by Harold Krantz using a syndicate was the three-storey brick and concrete construction, Riviera. The Riviera Investments Ltd company was formed in 1936 to raise the capital to acquire land on the corner of Mount’s Bay Road and Mill Street in Perth on which the Riviera flats were constructed in 1937.