The head of estate agency Nesbits’ sales team is marking 50 years with the independent brand.
Robin Evans has looked back on his career so far since he started at the Southern England-based company in February 1973 on just £7 per week.
He said: “I found my duties taking a rapid and unexpected trajectory, the office junior taking on the responsibility for handling the firm’s lettings and residential sales activities following the departure of long-standing employees within just months of my arrival.
“Happily, my juggling of house sales with the preparation of inventories and the like ended after a few years, leaving me to focus solely on all things property related.”
His own personal archive shows his first house sale was for a three-bedroom home for £9,750.
Evans added: “The same archive shows a two-bedroom Seafront having been sold in 1974 for £14,000 going on to be sold by me again some 46 years later for a twenty-fold uplift.
“Thousands of transactions over 50 years have included many and varied highlights, Southsea Seafront providing particularly fertile territory, a walk along Eastern Parade allowing me to identify around half its housing stock as having gone through my hands at some time.”
Looking back at how the property industry has changed over the half century he has worked in it, Evans said: “The advent, and subsequent dramatic expansion, of the internet has brought about a transformation in the way property is marketed and sold, but, and to oft-voiced frustration, the essential workings of the buying/selling system remains little altered.
“I readily confess to offering younger listeners, nearly everyone, the benefit of my opinion that ‘this job was a lot more straightforward back in the day.’
“A somewhat rose-tinted perspective I am sure, but with a strong element of truth. Certainly bureaucracy, in its many manifestations, held less of a grip than is the case today.”
His main regret is not keeping a record of the many interesting incidents he has come across.
Evans said: “One event is recalled, and this after a gap of 40-odd years: I can still see the look on the face, and the utter dismay in the voice, of the buyer who, having minutes before collected the keys to his investment purchase from my office, returned in a whirl of anger to inform me that ‘they (the sellers) have stolen my doorknobs’.
“As to the future? I continue to immensely enjoy the work I do, my enthusiasm for the Portsmouth property scene being undimmed. With sufficient evidence of appreciation and respect from both the public and fellow professionals, I am happy to keep going.”
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Many congratulations from another lifer (although not with the same firm) and I see we both started on exactly the same weekly wage.
And it didn't get much better in 1982 when I started on a YTS at £25 a week!
Congrats from a 1972 £5.35 a week Mann & Co office junior
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