The Australian retailer taking on the world sitting down

When the newly appointed CEO of King Living, David Woollcott, first started with the Australian furniture retailer last year, he admits he was puzzled by the price point for their popular range of sofas.

“I was questioning why we don’t charge more for our product,” he said. “With the Jasper (sofa), which starts from around $4000, we could charge $7000 or $8000.”

The galvanised steel-framed sofas, which come with a 25-year warranty, have a strong following in Australia where they are a popular choice for those looking for affordable style that will last. The range includes sofas and armchairs in a variety of styles designed to be flexible enough to suit any space, or lifestyle, at a price point that is deliberately accessible.

Central to the success of King Living, which started as a mother and son enterprise with David King and his mother Gwen in the 1970s, has been the decision to keep design, manufacturing and retailing under the one roof. Woollcott said it places King Living in a rare position in the market.

“We are in control, which is exciting for the consumer,” he said. “We know how our product is made and where the materials are sourced and we are acting as one entity. That instils trust.”

It also means there are no additional players looking to add further costs.

“We don’t support a third party, so the additional margin we invest in quality,” he said.

King Living has marked their time in the Australian market with the re-release of its first piece of furniture, now known as the 1977 sofa. A surprisingly contemporary-looking chair designed to be ‘built’ piece by piece to create a modular sofa of your choice to suit small or large spaces, it embodies the kind of relaxed elegance Australian design has become known for.

The 1977 King Living sofa was recently re-released. It can be mixed and matched to any configuration.

It’s a design aesthetic and business model Woollcott said has been embraced as King Living expanded into markets in Singapore and Europe in recent years with North America to follow soon.

“What delineates us is that we are a designer, manufacturer and retailer of furniture — that is really unique,” he said. “There are many businesses who do the retail bit and they source from factories around the world. But we are in control, which is exciting for the consumer.”

While the size of living spaces vary significantly across Europe, Asia and North America, Woollcott said there is enough variation and flexibility in the range to accommodate customers’ needs, whether it is the generous proportions of the Jasper and Kato sofas or the more compact Aura and Fleur designs. While best known for their sofas, King Living also has an extensive range of dining furniture, as well as beds, floorcoverings, lighting and storage options. Their outdoor furniture range is also gaining a strong following, taking the same approach to the design and construction of their interior furniture and translating it for outdoor spaces.

And it’s not just the Australian market taking notice.

“Australian design is globally loved because it has a casual nature to it,” he said. “It’s informal, which doesn’t mean it is less sophisticated or less detailed.

“Coming from the UK where it is all about the class structure and formality, Australia is the antithesis. It’s warm, approachable and casual.”

The King Cove reclining sun lounge is part of the popular outdoor furniture range.

Having spent the past five years in Europe as managing director of Fisher & Paykel UK & Europe, Woollcott is aware that customers are increasingly concerned about the sustainability of their products. The ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ ethos is nothing new to King Living, he said.

“What stunned me when I met (founder) David King, they have acted sustainably from day one because they have made that link with waste not being a good thing,” he said. “It’s all about resources. I don’t think there would be a business leader out there who would not see the link between preserving resources and saving money.”

King Living also offers their King Care service, a commitment to recover or completely refurbish sofas for a cost, whether they were manufactured in 1977 or 2023.

While it may seem like a lot of fuss over a sofa, Woollcott noted that this key piece of furniture is often the backdrop to family life for years.

“Memories are made on our furniture and the sofa can end up becoming a member of the family,” he said. “Our furniture is designed to last for generations — and to be reconditioned.

“They take on a personality of their own.”

Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.

Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.

Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.

Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.

Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.

Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.

“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.

Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.

Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.

In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.

Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.

Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.

Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.

In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .

The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .

“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”

The Australian retailer taking on the world sitting down

After almost half a century in Australia, the furniture brand has started taking on the world, one sofa at a time

The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales