In this very special series of exclusive articles for the Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker reflects on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Norman has a limited life expectancy of five years from December 2018 due to a diagnosed terminal blood cancer, which he has cheerfully accepted in preference to (in his words) “kicking the bucket without notice”. We are honoured he has chosen us to publish these brilliant, funny and incisive reflections of a lifetime in property.

Chapter 9: No limit to nature’s gifts or not, as the case may be

At the end of the last sleep-inducing episode, I’d established myself as nature’s gift to valuation. This didn’t last!

Turning to my private life, I’d married while still a student. It was a church wedding – and counted as being very posh because the unlucky girl wasn’t even pregnant.

I’ve had too many partners – I was once described as a ‘serial marriager’! If you think I’m going to criticise or make the partners the butt of my humour, then you’ll be disappointed. They were unfortunate, to say the least, and I was always the one at fault.

We married on Easter Saturday on the last day of the UK financial year – but I don’t think there was any tax advantage to me; it was just a coincidence.

Like most men, I used to forget my wedding anniversary. That must have been why I wrote the definitive Easter formula and VBA function in Excel in 2000. It’s all based on the moon and the vernal equinox. That tells me my wedding day must have been 5 April 1969.

When is my wedding anniversary? Auspicious moon = EASTER(YEAR(A6),0)

If you’re not asleep yet, then I’m falling down on the job as usual.

To get back on the track I keep stumbling off, I wasn’t nature’s gift to anyone! The reality was completely different in 1974. I was never a ‘bon viveur’ – more a boring f@rt who was only really interested in work. That, of course, was the cause of marriage failure and illustrates that the fault was mine.

In my interim bachelorhood, I became nature’s gift – at least in my mind, I did.

Nature’s gift: me in my dreams… she could have had me if she’d played her cards right… and me in reality

That last photo is me – on a good day. You really don’t want to see me on a bad day. I see myself at my best after a hot shower in the morning when I look, without my spectacles, in the fogged-up bathroom mirror.

While waiting for the Tate Gallery to open one Sunday afternoon, I walked into a nearby gay bar wearing an inappropriate T-shirt that jokingly advertised my flat as a bordello. I was with an extraordinary woman, who I had met by chance, and who later became my second wife and mother of my son. She asked, “Norman! Did you ever think that there might be a double meaning of your T-shirt?” I looked around. We made a hasty exit as she protected my rear – in both senses of the term.

But that date was an exception to my usual lack of appeal, and one might regard me as being somewhat like a druid.

1974 – living like a druid:

What I fell short on in the ‘nature’s gift’ stakes, I attempted to make up for in my life as a valuer.

In 1974 I had my first compulsory purchase compensation case, and that ran for over ten years. It involved the so-called ‘champagne estates’ land on the outskirts of the new town of Basildon, an area over which the town was destined to expand as the 1970s progressed.

These ‘champagne estates’ had been parcelled up and sold to coachloads of potential buyers in the 1930s. These mugs were bussed up from London and treated with lots of champagne by the unscrupulous sellers, who had bought up land for peanuts and laid out very thin tarmac roads supposedly servicing the plots. No sewers, no electricity, no water. Absolutely perfect for immediate development!

My client had bought one of these blocks in the 1930s. By the 1970s he had become an alcoholic, who I could only meet or telephone between 10:00 and 12:00 – in other words between him waking up and him imbibing too much.

Compulsory purchase could be unusual in the 1970s: the cause, the land… and the client:

I argued that if I ignored the acquiring authority’s scheme – the original new town – then the land would have been ripe for development as part of one of the small villages that existed there before Basildon was created in 1948 under the New Towns Act 1946. I negotiated as hard as I could and then stalled, and stalled, and…

The reason for stalling was that the client was entitled to an advance payment of 90% of the amount offered. That advance payment was cash in hand and was not taxable. It was much more than he would have in his drunken hands, after tax, even if we agreed the higher amount I was then claiming. The official valuer didn’t want to push it to court and we would ‘settle at the door’ if he did! It was big money at the time.

When it was finally agreed, the client just disappeared abroad somewhere. He’d discovered that extradition agreements didn’t cover tax evasion.

I might have told him the law on extradition. But I didn’t advise him or tell him what to do!

I don’t think my attitude to taxation is strictly ethical, but neither do I think my attitude is different from that of most of us human beans.

Image credits: Rob Mieremet/Dutch National Archives (image of Sean Connery); Galería Elmyr (image of Ursula Andress).