Articles

Describe SHW in three words…

Keen, competent, and capable.

What are you/your team’s expert areas?

Our team covers occupational, development and investment agency.  The firm is full service, and as well as agency, it also provides property management, professional and building surveying.

Tell us about your career at SHW.

After 10 fun filled years in London specialising in Provincial Office Agency, I joined SHW in 1998 to help owners and occupiers of offices in the Southeast, mainly on the Sussex Coast. In 2011 I was elected Managing Partner and did that for 10 years, doubling the firm’s revenue over this period. In 2021 returned to agency to specialise in investment transactions throughout the UK, with particular emphasis on Southeast England, and driving business development across the whole firm.

How did you get into the industry?

When I was 14, I decided that I should like to be in property and got a Saturday job at Fox & Sons (great people!) Goring Branch. I was allowed to make tea, operate the photocopier, and answer the telephone, very similar to my role now!  Later, I worked In Chapel Road Worthing (Head Office!) with Foxes full time for a year selling houses then went to college to study estate management for three years, later joining Healey & Baker in London

What are your qualifications?

In 1989 I qualified as a surveyor, and I am now a Fellow of the RICS.   

What do you like most about your job?

Debbie and Suzanne on Brighton reception, without them, I don’t know what my life would be…  Also…. the chance to help younger people learning their way along to Chartered status.

 

Pinnacle of your career to date?

Having enough demand to let the 200,000 sq ft of speculatively built offices at City Park in Hove three times over.

Favourite/most challenging project to date?

The five building 250,000 sq ft Trafalgar Place scheme by Brighton Station.  Since Robert Stiles originated the whole creation on disused railway siding being sold by Railtrack, we must have let each building twice or more. We have managed, done rent reviews, sales, rating and building surveying.  We love it!

Best advice you have ever been given?

There is no lunch hour.

Who do you most admire in the industry?

Everyone with a new view on how to do things more efficiently and effectively. I have always liked working for clients that some others find difficult; I find they think further and faster and are fun to work with. They appreciate the value their advisors bring. I’m not naming them as they would think I was being sycophantic. They know who they are.

What are three things you’d like to do before you retire?

• Arrange for all clients to understand that larger fees mean better recruitment means better people in surveying means better advice.

• Improve my putting and wedge play.

• Obtain a time machine and do it all again, but this time knowing the cyclical market bubble pop time for each up and down swing in the economy.