Lismore & surrounds has quite a few family names that have called this area home since it became a town in 1856 like the McLennans, but not many can say they have a family history in business that dates back more than 90 years.

The Northern Star newspaper started in 1875 as our oldest surviving business as a name but it has changed ownership a few times. The North Coast Co-Operative (NORCO) opened its first branch factory in 1900 with many farmer owners and Harris Cycles in Keen Street and Trevan Ford also have a rich history.

R Gordon and Son is a fifth generation family business operating for 92 years. This is their story as told by Andrew and Nathan Gordon.

In 1928 my great grandfather Robert Gordon started this business with his son Ray Gordon (Andrews grandfather and former Mayor of Lismore). Then there was my father James, myself and now Nathan so that’s the five generations.

It has always been ‘and Son’, never ‘Sons’, it has always only been the father and one son. There has been no daughters to this stage but that may change in the future because we have a few girls interestingly enough in the next generation down from Nathan so we may well see R Gordon and Daughter! The name has evolved to RGS Real Estate recently so that may be used in the coming generations.

I would love to see a sixth generation here and if that turned out to be a girl that would be fabulous.

R Gordon and Son has been operating in this building since 1928, from the very start. The only difference was that there was a brick wall down the middle with the right side being R Gordon and the left side being Selwoods Travel at the time.

Dad bought Selwoods and turned it into a Harvey World Travel franchise. Ran it for a couple of years then sold it to Faye and Trevor Hoff who took it around the corner and eventually renamed it Cruise and Travel.

Back then, R Gordon and Son was principally a stock and station agency dealing with cattle and even up until my father’s generation, was the main source of income. We were principally cattle, dairy and pigs.

These are old stock and station agents back in the 1930’s and someone drew a characterisation of them.

In the 1950’s R Gordon and Son was the biggest stock and station agent outside of Sydney.

Grandparents on both sides were dairy farmers, one in Lennox Head and one in Jiggi and grandpa Hunter (Andrews mums parents) were in Corndale.

Ray Gordon was Mayor of Lismore prior to the war

Grandpa Gordon (Ray) started up East Coast Mortgage Trust in Club Lane which was about funding people in the rural community to get them a start. Plenty of people will tell you that they got their starts through this company. People would come in and say I want to buy some cattle and he would lend them the money or to buy a farm, we’ll lend you the money. Apparently in that field he was very generous.

Grandpa died in 1981, you forget.

Graham Brown started Wal Murray First National with help from Grandpa Ray in the 1980’s, James sold his share when Graham died in the ‘90’s 

A lot of people got their start at R Gordon back in the day like Graham Brown and Graham Patch from Patch & Taylor.

I (Andrew) started work for R Gordon in 1990 in Byron Bay after graduating from the police academy at Goulburn and spending seven years at Darlinghurst in Sydney.

I met Nathan’s mum while in the police force and we wanted to get out of Sydney but found it hard to get a country job. In those days a country posting was hard to get in the police force on the north coast. Dad offered me a job in Byron Bay at his then Elders franchise (now Ray White).

R Gordon and Son was the first regional branch of Elders. John Elliot was in charge of Elders IXL as it was known in those days and Elders wanted to break into the rural community as a national franchise so dad took it on in the early 1980’s.

Then it ran its course. We dropped the Elders Franchise in Byron Bay and took on the Ray White franchise which is run by my brother David but couldn’t get it here (Lismore) because it was already taken so we went back to the old trading name in the early 2000’s. It was still Elders when Nathan started work.

The Elders franchise changed direction at the end. They had a very rural focus, Elders Rural, and we used to have people ringing up wanting to order bales of hay or bags of grain. All the support that we had received dried up while Ray White offered all the support under the sun.

What was property prices like in Byron back in early 1990's?

We used to live at 36 Marvel Street in Byron which was a rented Church of England house. They ended up offering the house for $90,000 and we said no way in the world because it was a thousand years old.

We were selling Sunrise Beach blocks in the early 90’s when a guy name Nodda Regis who worked for Burns Philp & Co shipping company developed the land after buying about 50 or 60 acres from a local guy.

The first blocks released were offered for $19,500 for about 800 square metres. Everyone was saying that it is all reclaimed land that will turn into swamp. We were struggling to sell that land at Sunrise Beach. We had a little box out there that I used to sit in waiting for people to come out so you could talk them into buying a block of land. Danny Wills' parents (the surfer) brought a block from us.

At this time the developing arm of Burns Philp went broke and another guy turned up who was a bit of a marketing guru. Anyway he said to put the blocks up to $26,000. We said you can’t sell them for $19,500 so how are you going to sell them for $26,000. He said just do it so we did and everyone thought they were missing out and they sold like hot cakes. Even us in the office were convinced so we bought a block for twenty six thousand bucks. We built a house for about $70,000 through a company called Settlers Cottages so for less than a hundred grand we had a brand new house in Sunrise Beach estate in 1992.

It was full of locals, four or five families in Byron that did everything, the Kenways, the George Knotts, who were the movers and shakers and if you were friends with them, which we were, it made life measurably easier because you got their work. We are the oldest real estate agent in Byron and have a great connection to the community down there.

It was about 1994 when I moved to the Lismore office.

Dad got cancer and was told he had three months to live which is why we moved back to the North Coast. We would visit him on Brisbane hospital and he looked terrible but, thankfully, he lived another twenty years.

(Andrew and Nathan Gordon in the original R Gordon building from 1928)

Nathan started working at R Gordon in February, 2007.

I went to school at Woodlawn then did a first year apprenticeship at Trevans Ford as a motor mechanic then did a Cert 4 in chemistry and worked at the environmental analysis lab at the Uni for about three years testing the ph level in the soil for farmers growing sugar cane and the like.

After being there three years I needed a change and there was a position here in property management. I started just before the boom of 2010 buying my first house for $250,000, I thought I’d paid too much for it. Dad said there is not a good time to get into the market just get in when you can. So I did.

When was the biggest period for Lismore?

I think it was during my fathers and grandfathers era. I reckon in the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s when R Gordon and Son was recognised as the biggest stock and station agent outside of Sydney.

They would have sales back then when the trucks used to line up back to Bakers Corner, literally of pigs. Even when I first started there while I was at school doing the pencilling we were doing a couple of hundred pigs but back then they were doing a couple of thousand pigs.

They sold the occasional farm but the principal business was cattle and pigs with the odd horse.

When we were kids there were four or five stock and station agents and now there is only one, Weir and Son.

The emphasis moved for us during the stock market crash in the 70’s when Dad was left high and dry and his father bailed him out. He owned about a thousand head of cattle which went from being worth $100 a head to being worth $1 a head.

Dad attributes his brain cancer to the stress of that era not the fact that he smoked four thousand cigarettes a day! It was purely the stress created by that situation.

Things started to change. Dad owned Walker and Gordon which focused on the stock and station side while R Gordon and Son started to focus on real estate.

This photo from 1955 at the Show that shed is still there and so is that one.

Ray Gordon, my grandfather, Tim Gordon, his uncle, and a guy named Ian Alexander who was Margaret Robinson’s father. Margaret Robinson was the most successful agent in Byron Bay because she was the chip off the old block. Everyone will tell you he was the most outstanding auctioneer the north coast had. People would literally come and watch him sell because he was so gifted.

If you look at the picture you have Charlton Avenue, Deegan Drive, Gordon Street, Caldwell Avenue, Wotherspoon Street in North Lismore, Walker Street, East Lismore, Rutherford Street. They were all named after these families and that’s how it worked back in the day. Gordon Street has got three houses in it, it’s the shortest street in town, ha.

They were the movers and shakers of town. They were Aldermen or Mayors, Town Clarks or General Managers.

When was Lismore biggest time during the modern era?

In the 90’s we had our largest office walls coated with houses for sale, I can guarantee we had over 200 listings for under $100,000 and absolutely no one looking, no one, it was really really tough. 

I remember buying a house in Martin Drive for $67,000 and another in Casino Street for $65k, there was a house in Crown Street that I paid $48,000 for.

In about the early 2000’s things started to take off. You could buy a property for $100,000, do a small reno and sell it for $180,000 twelve months later.

Lismore was considered the regional centre for growth and business and we offered the opportunity of growth. 1998 was the year that Lismore sold 300 approved residential blocks in one year, we’ve been lucky to reach double digits since then.

Back in those days Jeff Champion was the Mayor, you had these proactive business people who saw a way of meeting Lismore’s costs by the way of population growth. Developers could come to town and you could develop land.

In Dad’s times Council would come in and put the road down as well as the curb and guttering and those sorts of things because they knew they were going to create a rate payer.

Now the focus is on the developer paying for everything. Back then it was a great partnership. I think that is where we should be going again. As the community grows they pay their rates, have kids, go to school, buy clothes and everyone benefits from it.

What is stopping Lismore from growing again?

The lack of land supply. There is no large parcel of land being released because it is not being approved by our councillors.

We need to grow our rate paying base.

The future growth is north or west of us. The temptation is go east towards the coast but what we want to do is capture the wealth that we can generate. We want those people to live here.

The Northern Plateau is the most obvious choice. It is a 1,500 home site. I just can’t imagine it being anywhere else.

(Aerial picture of the potential Northern Plateau development)

It has been twenty five years in the making but the people who buy those blocks and build will send their kids to school and do their shopping in town as well as cars and petrol.

Monaltrie is another opportunity. It has half a inch of top soil, it’s the poorest cattle country on the planet but it has the northern ridge that looks straight over town and the Nightcap Range.

How is the current real estate market?

The real estate market now is unprecedented, unprecedented because there is no supply.

People that leave Sydney come up here with wealth that we can’t generate so they can afford to buy a 5 acre block at Boatharbour or McLeans Ridges.

In 2015 we struggled to sell 26 acres at McLeans Ridges looking over Mt Warning with a tennis court, pool and granny flat for $750,000. If you listed it now it would be $1.75 million easily. You would have buyers coming out of your ears.

Paying up to $1 million for a house is not abnormal now in this type of market. That type of price is becoming more common place.

Recently we sold a three bedroom unit in Carolina Street for $345,000, I thought that would never happen and it sold in five minutes, sold that day.

The problem we have is for young people living in Lismore trying to get into the housing market.

Look at Hidden Valley near Chilcotts Grass, fifty percent of those blocks were sold to kids coming out of Ballina. They can’t buy a block of land and build a house in the post code they grew up in, it’s too dear so they come here.

Where are our kids going? They earn forty grand a year, that’s the average wage, where are they going? Further west.

There are three shires east of the Great Dividing Range with negative growth and Lismore is one of them, Kyogle and Grafton are the other two.

People are leaving, those business people looking for opportunities and they are not going very far, they’re going to Ballina and Casino where the opportunities exist.

What we need in September is some councillors who want to see Lismore grow and prosper for the next 5-10 years not continue that recent negative growth trend. No one will benefit from that scenario.