Larapinta Private launches to advise the wealth locked up in Australia’s farmland

Troy Armstrong

Larapinta Private has launched as a specialist wealth and family office firm for Australia’s regional, agricultural and pastoral families. Founder and senior financial adviser Troy Armstrong has built the firm for a group he says the big end of town has never served well: those whose wealth is tied up in farms, stations and the land itself.

Larapinta Private occupies a niche the major institutions cannot serve, and the local accountant cannot scale: specialist, succession-led wealth and investment advice for regional, agricultural and pastoral families.

It is an opportunity few advisers have taken on, and the firm has been built solely for these families, bringing the kind of expertise usually found inside the big institutions to wealth that has, until now, largely gone unadvised.

“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.”

Troy Armstrong, Founder of Larapinta Private said, “There is enormous wealth tied up in the land in this country, and almost no one advises it properly. Existing firms are typically built for the city executives and boardroom-based, quarterly review cycle, with conversations geared to share portfolios, superannuation and the family home.

These conversations and rhythm are poorly suited to a farming or pastoral family. “For these families, seasonal cashflow, illiquid balance sheets and operating risk are the starting point,” he said. “A good season and a drought year call for very different plans.”

With the full capability of an investment office behind the firm, portfolios are built around a framework Larapinta Private calls Foundation and Conviction, a long-hold, broadly diversified strategic core, modest and time-bound high-conviction allocations, and a treasury sleeve sized to each family’s drawdown rhythm. The firm holds no proprietary products and takes no commission income.

The scale is considerable: Australia has 387 million hectares of agricultural land, and farmland values have nearly tripled since 2010 to reach a record national median at the end of 2025, according to Bendigo Bank Agribusiness and ABS figures. Much of that wealth is illiquid and approaching a generational handover as landholders age.

Succession also sits at the centre of the firm’s work, and it is the issue Armstrong says weighs most heavily on the families he meets.

“The hardest conversation on the land is rarely about returns,” he 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.” Alongside the families existing professional advises, the firm plans the handover before it becomes a crisis, helping families pass on what they have built intact.

He is also adamant that families should not have to sell to build wealth. “Most of these families have spent a lifetime building something on the land,” said Armstrong. “My job is to build lasting wealth from that, without them having to give up the place to do it. Planning the right structures and buckets of wealth before the liquidity event is paramount”

Armstrong launches Larapinta Private after leaving Koda Capital, following earlier years inside Australia’s major financial institutions. Now under the banner of Larapinta  Private, the firm gives families that same depth of investment capability without the conflicts of a larger group, alongside a degree of personal service few advisers offer, including travelling well beyond the city to meet clients on their own properties.

The firm brings the same patience to the way it invests as it does to the deep relationships behind it. “We invest with a long horizon. We are not chasing short-term performance,” said Armstrong. “We are stewarding wealth that needs to last across generations.”

The name carries the same idea, taken from one of the oldest river systems in the country as a nod to permanence and to relationships measured in generations rather than quarters.

“The families I work with are not looking for another name on a city tower, 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.”