Forty years
in one
industry.
Established 1985 · Family-led, second generation · 4,573 businesses placed
In 1985, the Australian accommodation industry didn’t have a specialist agent. The frameworks for motel leasing hadn’t been drafted. Off-the-plan management rights — now a $4bn structure — didn’t exist as a legal mechanism. The buyer pool for these assets, as a national pool, didn’t yet exist. ResortBrokers was founded to fill that gap. Forty years on, the firm is what made the gap fillable.
4,573 transactions. One industry.
Every motel, hotel, management rights, caravan park, apartment hotel, backpackers and pub the firm has placed since 1985 — mapped to the broker who placed it, the year it sold, and the asset class it belonged to. Drag the year slider 1985 → 2026 and watch the dots accumulate.
An industry without an agent.
Ian Crooks founded ResortBrokers in Brisbane in 1985, with a single conviction: the accommodation sector was an asset class in its own right, and its sale and acquisition deserved a specialist agent.
The first six years were spent doing two things in parallel: placing transactions, and writing the frameworks that would let those transactions happen. The standard motel lease, drafted with industry counsel in 1986, is still the basis of most leasehold motel transactions in Australia today.
By 2020, when Trudy Crooks took over as Managing Director, ResortBrokers had placed more than three thousand businesses, opened the Sydney and Melbourne offices, and brought management rights, caravan parks, hotels, apartment hotels, backpackers and pubs into the same operating model. The firm had become what its founder set out to build forty years earlier.
Frameworks we helped write.
Specialist brokerage in this asset class wasn’t possible until the legal and commercial structures existed. ResortBrokers was often present at the table when those structures were being drafted — sometimes as a witness, sometimes as a co-author.
Standard motel lease
The first nationally-standard motel leasing template. Drafted with industry counsel in the year after the firm was founded. Still the basis of most leasehold motel transactions today.
Management rights
Model agreements bundling caretaking and letting authorities into a single tradeable interest. ResortBrokers was the first agency to handle MR transactions at national scale.
Off-the-plan MR
A mechanism for selling management rights into developments before construction completes. Now a $4bn structure across Queensland and New South Wales alone.
Forty years. Year by year.
A selected ledger of the firm’s milestones — written entries, not press release headlines. Each year contains many things we don’t list here; what’s listed is what changed the shape of the firm or the industry it sits inside.
Four directors. One firm.
Trudy Crooks leads the firm as Managing Director, alongside her brother Tim, her sister Carla, and Carla’s husband Alex Cook. Each runs a region or a function — and each carries the placement count to back the role.
The network on the map is not a claim. It is the ledger, drawn.
came back.
A working anniversary.
Year 40 is not a marketing year. It is a year in which several long-running pieces of work converge — each part of the same project: making forty years of specialist focus more accessible, more defensible, and more useful to the next generation of operators.
The public Sold ledger
Every settled transaction in the firm’s history, with the price visible, made public for the first time. We made it the homepage.
The Operator Hub
A free, no-login set of tools for people running an accommodation business — annual valuation, regional benchmarks, comparable-sale alerts. Built from the same data the brokers use.
RB Research, scaled
The Motel Report becomes annual. Management rights, caravan park and apartment hotel reports added in 2026 and 2027. A standing national reference.
The next ten years look like the last forty.
Specialist. National. Family-led. Built on a continuously-maintained ledger of every transaction we have ever placed. The structural moves of the next decade — the public Sold ledger, the Operator Hub, the scaled research operation, the next generation of brokers behind the second — are evolutions of forty years of specialist work, not departures from it. The continuity is the strategy.