Gary’s done it all with Blowes’ 50 good years
In his 50 years in real estate in Orange, Gary Blowes has seen and done it all, but he’s not quite ready to call it a day yet.
“I did the first open house in Orange,” he says as an aside during our conversation, later throwing in, that he was the first local agent to use television advertising and that he also sold the first house out at Clifton Grove.
“It made $21,000 and it was on five acres, a four-bedroom, double garage…. but, yeah, I've done it all. I've sold things for next to nothing and I sold the first house in Orange to make a million dollars. I’ve seen some major changes; I started off selling 3000 square metre blocks of land for $3000 each. Now I'm talking about 500 square metres of land for $300,000!”
A third-generation agent, Gary was going to the local stockyards with his father from the time he was six. At the age of 17, he joined him in the business, which became known as Lance Blowes and Son.
“I was 17 and Dad said to me one day, ‘Can you sell real estate?’ We only ever sold stock and he said, ‘Well, we're not making enough money selling stock, so have a go at it’,” Gary recalls.
“One thing led to another, and I haven't been back to a saleyards since!”
Blowes Real Estate came to be when Gary’s father retired and it has remained largely the same in the 50 years since.
“It has had a couple of little changes along the way, we got tangled up with the Professionals at one stage, I had a partner at one stage but, predominantly, I've been on my own and it has been very kind to us.
“We're not the biggest agency in town by any means — I was once. I had this burning ambition to have the biggest agency in Orange, but when I got it, I wished to Christ I'd never seen it!
“So now we're down to six staff here, and it's just a nice number. I'm lucky I've got good, conscientious staff who are more interested in making a sale than making money. That's one of the things my dad told me: make the sale and the money will come. When you start chasing the money instead of the sale, you lose your perspective.”
Over the past five decades, Gary has seen many changes in the real estate industry, not the least of which is the technology available to agents today.
He recalls one meeting many years ago, when a colleague was telling him that one day you could have a virtual inspection of a property in Brisbane from your desk at home.
“I said, ‘what a load of sh*t!’ and now it's happening,” laughs Gary, who still works out of a paper diary as he always has because, as he puts it, ‘that’s just the way I am’.”
But it is the nature of the relationships you form with clients that has been the biggest change in the business, according to Gary.
“In my early days, you formed relationships with people and with families. People would come along and say, ‘you sold my Mum and Dad a house and they said to come and see you’. You had referral business from friends and things like that,” he says.
“Now it doesn't exist because you meet people on-site, you show the one house and they go and see some other agent and look at another house… You could sell real estate off a push bike to be honest, because you don't get anybody in the car with you anymore.”
There have been good times and ordinary times over the years, says Gary, but even he has been surprised by the current boom in real estate prices in Orange.
“Yeah, I've never seen a boom like it — ever!” he says, adding the only comparison might be during the Federal Government’s ill-fated decentralisation plan in the 1970s.
“Gough Whitlam's brainchild. They were gonna build a city between Orange and Bathurst of a million people and they raced out here and they bought land everywhere… Of course, it all fell by the wayside.”
But the world will turn and booms don’t last forever, although Orange is in a more fortunate position than many other rural centres, he says.
“Between the mining, the medical and the tourism where we're basically bulletproof,” he says.
“I don't think it'll go backwards; it will plateau somewhere and it will get harder to sell, but I don't think you'll see — in a place like this — where it will actually drop.”
At 70 years of age and having survived a cancer scare last year, Gary is starting to maybe think about slowing down, although he has a few things left on his plate.
“Well, I'm trying to do less,” he says unconvincingly, “When I got sick, I took on some fairly big things to make myself get out of bed… at that stage, they were saying the cancer was terminal. We've been beaten that, so I’m very lucky… But now I'm regretting it because I've got that much work on, it's ridiculous!
“But I do think about retiring. Some mornings it'd be nice just to not have to get up, but I don't play golf, I don't play bowls, and I've no patience as far as fishing is concerned…
“So, I won't be here when I'm 80, I can assure you that, but I don't know just where to cut it off at this stage either.”