17 Mar 2026
Words John Miller Informer

The Value of a Dollar

Within five years, Deltine High Yield Motel Fund aims to be Australia’s largest owned and operated motel chain.

It’s a grand ambition for a fund that started a little over 12 months ago with no assets or platform, but not so grand or improbable when you consider the individual driving it. David Toomey has the ambition, experience and smarts to make it happen.

Doubters should consider his resume. Dogged determination and hard graft have been Toomey’s signature characteristics that have seen the 49-year-old progress from a humble Brisbane auditor in the late 1990s to an investment manager in the City of London, then in Amsterdam with one of the world’s largest private equity funds, then, more recently, as chief revenue officer at EV charging company Tritium which he helped grow from a $10 million Brisbane startup to a $2 billion NASDAQ listed company.

Not bad for a boy from Woombye. If you talk to Toomey, his quiet tenacity gives the impression his success was never in doubt. During his London days, he used to carry a US one-dollar bill in his wallet. Why? It was to remind him of his ambition to one day work on Wall Street. His career journey to New York’s most fabled thoroughfare took eight years, but the point is he made it in the end. When he finally got to Wall Street to work on a $7.4 billion private equity deal with Cerberus Capital, he spent his dollar bill. On what he can’t remember. It had outlasted its purpose as a symbol to achieve his aim.

It’s that same burning ambition Toomey is now applying with Deltine. Since its inception in late 2024, the fund has acquired three regional freehold motels.

“We planned to have four acquisitions in the first year of the fund,” says Toomey. “We’ve got three motels with three more secured, so I think that’s a pass mark.”

“Now, we want to start ramping up to 10 acquisitions a year. Having four in the pipeline for the first half of 2026 gives us the momentum to carry forward and to start to crescendo in terms of the value and rate of acquisitions.”

Toomey’s five-year vision is to create a pan-Australian fund of over 50 regional and suburban motels with an asset value greater than $500 million. Nowhere is off limits; the fund is actively looking at freehold going concern motel opportunities across all states and territories.

“My passion for regional travel has been brewing for over 30 years, back to when I travelled around Queensland auditing companies as a graduate and staying in all sorts of regional motels,” says Toomey.

The fund’s first acquisition, the 26-key, four-star New Crossing Place Motel in Seymour, Victoria, is typical of Deltine’s acquisition criteria: good quality, good location and diverse occupancy drivers. Seymour is a busy country town thanks to the nearby Puckapunyal Army Base, Goulburn Valley and Eastern Lions Kart Club, one of the largest Go Karting tracks in Australia.

“They all come to New Crossing Place Motel because it’s the best in town,” says Toomey. “Asset quality is really important to us. It allows us to walk in and start operating a motel straight away. We don’t have to refurbish it. This motel was a standout first asset because it’s busy, it’s profitable — a good quality asset in a good location.”

The fund’s second acquisition, The Roseville Apartments, a 22-key, four-star property in Tamworth (transacted through ResortBrokers’ NSW Mid North Coast & New England agent Joshua Roberts), consolidated the Deltine template.

“Again, it was a bit of a standout,” says Toomey. “There aren’t many serviced apartments in Tamworth.” 

Acquisition number three, Amaroo Motel in Tumut, NSW, is a 29-key motel that Deltine expects to benefit from Snowy 2.0 and the upcoming construction of the HumeLink transmission line.

So far, investors seem sold on the fund. Currently, it has more than 60 investors and has had no problem attracting interest from sophisticated and wholesale investors, who can buy in with a minimum $50,000 investment. The fund’s targeted total returns of greater than 20% per annum, with 10%-plus income distributions paid monthly, have proved irresistible. Deltine High Yield Motel Fund has lived up to the promise of its name; since inception, the fund’s distributions have hit the mark, annualising at 10.5%.

“What catches people’s attention are the returns you can get from this sector,” says Toomey. “People are also really attracted to the differentiation of the fund. Regional motels are also something a lot of people can easily relate to but haven’t come across as an investment before. They’re looking for quality when they’re travelling themselves, and it’s often hard to find. They can see the opportunity there. The vision resonates with them. They want to be part of creating this motel chain because it’s unique and much needed.”

“There’s a lot of people in Australia with cash looking for a place to put it. I think it’s really good to be able to create a product for them that’s high yielding, diverse, property backed, low debt and just a good, solid vanilla buy-and-hold investment. It’s a real privilege to be able to offer that to the investment market.”

Toomey got the idea of Deltine early in his career working in corporate finance. His team at FTI Consulting was in the midst of consolidating Australia’s senior living space – known in the trade as a “roll-up” — into a listed company that would become the ASX-listed Eureka.

“A couple of brokers said to me, ‘If you’re interested in this, why don’t you look at motels? The yields from the motel sector are good if not better, and no one has consolidated that sector yet.’ As a team, we started researching that. I spearheaded part of the research and started doing some modelling.”

The idea stuck with Toomey, but he didn’t act on it until Tritium listed on the NASDAQ.

“I came back to Australia and thought, ‘What am I going to do with my own money?’” he says. “Like a lot of sophisticated investors in Australia, you land on commercial property. During that time, commercial property yields had compressed. But I always looked at motel yields, which hadn’t compressed as much. They were still much higher than what you could get in other commercial property sectors like industrial or retail. You can get really good diversification with motels, really positive high cash flow, they’re very profitable and relatively simple from an operational perspective. It’s just a good investment. Then my fund management and investment analysis background pulls it all together.”

Toomey’s investment chops are impressively extensive. While an accounting and business student at the Queensland University of Technology in the mid- to late-1990s, he harboured ambitions of being an equity analyst. After graduating and working in Brisbane for a few years, he went to London where he started to transition into investment management, working for Credit Suisse First Boston ABN Amro.

When he didn’t get the opportunities he wanted in London, he set his sights on Amsterdam because of the connection with ABN Amro, one of the Netherland’s largest banks. He spent three months in the canal city going to internet cafes every day to send out resumes and followed up on a pre-paid phone that churned through his limited savings very quickly. Despite not speaking Dutch or having equity analysis experience, his tenacity eventually landed him what he considered a “dream job” with AlpInvest, one of the world’s largest private equity funds.

“That’s where I really transitioned my career from accounting into investment management,” he says. “I really learned from the best. When I joined AlpInvest, it was managing €5 billion worth of assets. By the time I left, we managed €28 billion and I had transitioned from the portfolio and risk team to the co-investment team, investing with the likes of KKR & Co., Bain, CVC, BlackRock and TPG, investing €20 to €100 million into billion-dollar buy-out deals.”

Toomey studied the notoriously difficult Chartered Financial Analyst qualification to prove to the higher-ups at AlpInvest he wanted to be an investment analyst not just an accountant. In 2005, an opportunity came up to do a deal in New York that Toomey says had his name on it. Cerberus Capital was buying financial services giant GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation). AlpInvest was looking at the investment on behalf of Dutch Pension Fund ABP.

“I got to spend my one US dollar,” he says. “That was me working in New York doing the biggest deal in town on that day. It was a $7.4 billion transaction, and I was part of the investment team.”

“So, Deltine is right in my wheelhouse. Everything we need to do on a daily basis in terms of raising money, doing deals, negotiating, building a team and managing investors I’ve done countless times before around the world.”

Toomey is adept at growing something from nothing. Well, virtually nothing. When he joined Tritium, it was a $10 million Brisbane EV charging company no one had heard of. By the time he left, the company had listed on the NASDAQ and its CEO Jane Hunter was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with US President Joe Biden to announce the opening of Tritium’s Tennessee plant — part of the administration’s Build Back Better Plan.

When Tritium listed on Wall Street on Australia Day in 2022, Toomey was there to ring the closing bell, broadcast live on the Times Square jumbotron and on CNBC worldwide. Tritium’s success was as much Toomey’s as anyone’s: apart from the founders, he was the only executive to remain with the company throughout its journey from startup in 2014 to public listing on the world’s most active stock exchange in 2022.

“It was like building three or four different companies along the way,” he says. “We took it from a $10 million startup to a $50 million company in one phase of growth. Then we grew very quickly from $50 million to $300 million in another phase. We had to build a management team in the first phase and an executive team in the second phase, then we needed a new executive team because we were now a globally listed company that required a different level of skill set, a global skill set. The business experience it gave me was priceless. After I left Tritium, someone said to me, ‘It’s like you’ve done five MBAs.’”

For such a high-flying individual, Toomey comes across as eminently well-grounded. He is thoughtful, considered and unassuming. Despite an international career spanning Australia, Europe and the United States putting together deals worth billions, the persona of a simple country boy from Woombye, a town that owes its fame to something so kitsch as The Big Pineapple, seems to have never left Toomey despite his steely ambition to get ahead.

“I guess I was born with the drive to succeed,” he says. “From a young age, I was always quite entrepreneurial, making money. We lived on a hobby farm, growing avocados, in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland. Dad bought us a $100 tin of zucchini seeds, and my brother and I planted those, harvested them and sold the produce to a local fruit shop for $600. For a nine-year-old back in 1985, it was like winning the lotto.”

Toomey’s enthusiasm for regional motels draws from those simple country roots.

“My passion comes from growing up in regional Queensland,” he says. “It was a beautiful place to grow up. I’m from the regions. I love getting out there and seeing regional Australia. I love having the opportunity to showcase the food, wine, hospitality and products from our regions. We can do that through this motel brand. This brand will be one that oozes our passion for the regions.”

In time, likely within the next six months, the fund will brand its portfolio, but Toomey is keeping those details under wraps for now.

“We want to have a modern, aligned brand across the whole motel chain so that we can start raising brand awareness and getting repeat customers,” he says. “So that when people come into a town and see our brand they can stay with us and know exactly what to expect.” END