Residential
Explore
Real estate runs in Mr Thornton’s blood, and at the age of 23 he started selling property with his father at their Stafford Heights-based business.
Since then, he’s sold more than 1000 properties, equating to the value of more than $600 million.
Mr Thornton said a lot has changed in the real estate industry over the past 40 years.
“The technology of the time was so different and in the beginning we relied on two-way radios,” he said.
“Knowing the locations of all the public phone boxes was a must for communicating with the office and clients.
“The arrival of car phones, mounted under the dash with an aerial mounted on the rear window of the car, and later those hefty handheld walk-around mobile phones, to the new lightweight BlackBerry, Motorola and NEC and then the iPhone, has been a huge leap forward in communicating.”
The arrival of the computer was the biggest game changer for the real estate industry.
“We used 6X4 cards in a plastic box as our database, we received the sold data on a computer as a 15in blue-line printout from the Queensland titles office, some 3-4 weeks old information that we recorded to our 6X4 cards.
“We used cameras with a roll of film to take photos to then have them processed at the local chemist, to then send off to the newspaper to have printed on the real estate page in the midweek Quest newspaper.
“We then started using Excel spreadsheets on our stand-alone computer, and later to a hub main frame computer to record information and sales etc. But I always hand wrote this information down, because of computer failures and lost data.
“The market has changed nowadays. We have the cloud for storage, laptops, iPads and iPhones and so much more.”
Auctions were another part of the Brisbane real estate industry that Mr Thornton has seen grow over the past four decades.
“In the mid 1980s and early 1990s auctions surprisingly only made up about 10 per cent of the business back then, given Brisbane wasn't considered an ‘auction area’, with most auctions being for bank repossessions or estate sales and the odd goods and chattels auction,” he said.
“Now auctions make up 60 per cent of our business. However, It's reassuring to know that the core principle of creating competition among buyers at auctions has remained unchanged over the 40+ years I have been in the real estate industry.
“I have met some amazing auctioneers over the years Keith Brady, Ken Carter, Paul Crowther, Dan Atherton, Justin Nickerson, Phil Parker.”
With four decades of experience, Mr Thornton had some wise words of wisdom to pass onto the newer generations of real estate agents.
“Some of the best advice I received from my father, John Thornton, and his business partner Theo Coronis, was ‘you have two ears and one mouth, make sure you use your ears twice as much more than your mouth’,” he said.
“Another was ‘hustle, grind and read the play’. You need to hustle and get out there to meet people, door knocking the local streets, letter box drops and advertising placed under the car windscreen wipers in the local shopping centre.
“The midweek Quest newspaper and our office front window used to be some of our marketing tools. Now we have realestate.com and Domain. I believe the new agents over the past few years are too glued to their seat in the office.
“Working your database and connecting with the local community through school fates, sporting clubs, and the local Lions and Rotary clubs has been, and still is, a major connection to the market.”
To this day, Mr Thornton still loves working in real estate, and admires the strong work ethic and reliability of those in the real estate industry.
