ROBIN EVANS 50 YEARS AT NESBITS

from Southsea Lifestyle April / May 2023

LOCAL HEROES

My ex-naval father having made the introduction on my behalf, I joined the firm in February 1973, at the princely salary of £7 per week.

I found my duties taking a rapid and unexpected trajectory, the “office junior” taking on responsibility for handling the firm’s lettings and residential sales 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.

My well-thumbed personal archive, reminds me of my very first house sale – a threebedroom home in Claydon Avenue (still Milton at that time) sold for £9,750.

As a sharp illustration of bricksand-mortar inflation (and of property as an investment), the same archive shows a twobedroom Seafront flat having been sold in 1974 for £14,000, going on to be sold by me again some 46 years later for a twentyfold uplift.

1000s of transactions over 50 years have included many 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.

I am often asked how the world of property has changed over half a century. “Much and little” is the answer. 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!) of my opinion that “this job was a lot more straightforward back in the day”. A somewhat rosetinted perspective, but with a strong element of truth. Certainly bureaucracy, in its many manifestations, held less of a grip than is the case today.

I regret never acting on those occasions when observing that I should keep a diary of interactions with the public. Had I done so I would have a record of those many incidents that the job has thrown up, most now lost to a rather unreliable memory (not, let me assure current clients, age-related).

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 previously collected the keys to his investment purchase, returned in a whirlwind 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.