TMCnet News
Chartered surveyor with 45 years of perspective(The Irish Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Profile: Gordon Gill After 45 years in the property business, Gordon Gill is enjoying the good times in the industry, writes Rose Doyle Gordon Gill, chairman of DTZ Sherry FitzGerald, is one of those people about whom colleagues and friends agree they can't find a bad thing to say. A fine accolade at the best of times, it's especially true given that Gill this week celebrates 45 years in the property business. Gordon Gill is, quite simply, universally liked and respected. He's at a modest loss to understand this, is not even sure he believes it. What he does know and believe in is the business of commercial property as seen through the reflector of his 22 years with Lisney and the 23 he's spent with Sherry FitzGerald. He came to the business by accident. Born in Rathmines, he was a Leaving Cert student in the High School (then in Harcourt Street) when John Broadhead, head of Lisneys, approached the school seeking bright youngsters to join the company. As fate and those easier-going days would have it, the head of the High School lived next door to the Gill family . . . Gordon Gill joined Lisney at the beginning of September 1962. "I went in as a trainee chartered surveyor," he recalls, "something I knew nothing about before my interview with John Broadhead. I hung in there for the first 22 years of my working life." A three-bedroom house in Dalkey sold for GBP3,950 the week Gordon Gill joined Lisney. One in Kilternan, on an acre of land, sold for GBP4,500 and another, with three bedrooms on Griffith Avenue, sold for GBP3,500. "I always worked on the commercial side," he says. "It's a different animal to residential. I didn't even have a calculator in the beginning, it was a pen and paper job. Computers arrived about three/four years after I joined. We worked on Saturday mornings, which we all hated, in Lisney offices next door to where they are now; 23 St Stephen's Green. I went home to Rathmines on my motorbike for lunch. I started on GBP1.50 a week and was on GBP2 a year later. A 30 per cent increase! I managed to live on it too." Twenty years later, proving life really does complete circles, Gordon Gill bought those Lisney offices for Chuck Feeney of Atlantic Philantrophies. The business and the country changed as the 1960s went on. "The investment property vehicle was invented in the 1960s," Gill says, "coming from non-existent to fully-blown. It was led by UK developer-investors like the Rank Organisation, who built the likes of Hawkins House in Dublin, Friends Provident and indigenous Irish investors like Irish Life." It's been a long road, and rocky. "By 1973 we hit the first recession, in the early 1980s another, longer recession and in the early 1990s hit the currency recession. In 1993 the property business took off and kept going." He laughs merrily. "I've spent three-quarters of my working life in recession - though I'd say more than half of the people I work with never saw a black day." He'd qualified as a chartered surveyor and was head of valuations when, in 1984, he left Lisney for Sherry Fitz-Gerald. That job, too, came knocking at his door. "Mark FitzGerald, who'd started the company the year before, said they needed someone with maturity and experience. I was 40! I joined as commercial director. There were about 18 employees in the Merrion Row offices." He's thoughtful, musing that "most of us forget how bad the 1980s were. My life was kept going by receiverships and closures. We sold Mondello Park, Clover Meats in Waterford, a mushroom factory in Wexford. They were sad, sad days. Nobody was buying, the banks just looking for the best offer. All the old Irish companies were going and workers suffering terribly. The receivers would go on and lock-up and we'd come in after them and sell. It was hard meeting people who got the bad end of things." By 1988-'89 "things had started creeping up again. We sold the Cement Group Headquarters in Pembroke Street and after that there was a sort of upward move. "Then came the currency crisis of the early 1990s. People stopped buying property, rates went up to 18 to 22 per cent and there was general panic. But it bottomed out fairly quickly and the market moved on." He likes what's happening in today's Dublin. "The city council has a good apartment/commercial mix on the brownfield sites in the Docklands," he says. "It's great to see a population coming back into the city centre. High density, high quality - you have to have both. We do need more sport and social amenities however. It's vital to get redevelopment of the centre right and to get people back in there." He plays "bad golf", gardens the 0.75 acres around the Enniskerry home he's shared with wife Clare, daughters Rebecca and Pamela, for a quarter of a century. No nepotism in the family either, he laughs - one daughter works in systems in Eircom, the other is an architect. And Dublin, he says, "is a hell of a better city than it was 45 years ago". Copyright 2007 Irish Times Ltd. , Source: The Financial Times Limited |