Real Estate Institute of South Australia Centenary

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:24): I rise today to congratulate the Real Estate Institute of South Australia on its 100^th anniversary and thank them for the opportunity to attend their celebration at Adelaide Oval last week. The display around the room proudly showed a great deal of historic ephemera and provided me with the chance to be involved with people in the real estate sector, none more important to me than Mr Robin Matters, Director of the Real Estate Institute of South Australia and also the current President of the Muriel Matters Society.

South Australia’s unique model of colonisation has meant landbrokers and real estate agents have been at the heart of our state's social and economic history. It was the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who argued for the concentration of settlement through the orderly disposal of land at a set price, that set the frame for the early development of our state.

At the heart of Wakefield's plan was the notion that revenue raised from land sales would fund the emigration of workers to the nascent colony, with no cost burden to the British government—no need for real estate agents here. But of course things are always more complex. Light surveyed the new city of Adelaide and, necessarily, there was a need for professionals to facilitate the process of sale and conveyance of the new town acres. After surveying the city, Light himself went into the business of landbroking, but the stand-out agent of his time was a young John Morphett—a man whose name graces many an Adelaide locality.

The first sale of city land went to Dr Charles Everard, who chose two acres facing Victoria Square between Franklin Street and Grote Street. Within a few decades, the city had entered a boom period and agents and auctioneers were an integral part of the business community, so much so that in 1839 a group of agents and businessmen first got together to start a peak body. The later Depression saw this new chamber fail, and it went through a period of revival and collapse for another half century until a stable organisation emerged.

In the meantime, it was clear the system of land surveying and title was holding up development, pushing up rents and leading to aggressive property speculation. Enter Sir Robert Torrens, known today as one of South Australia's early innovators, with his revolutionary system of land titles: the Torrens Title scheme. In 1856, when Torrens first proposed this reform, there were some 40,000 titles to land in the colony, with three-quarters of the original deeds alleged to have been lost, a third owned by absentees who could not be traced and at least 5,000 either seriously complicated or possibly defective

The bill did not have an easy passage. The legal profession in particular opposed it, unsurprising given the lucrative fees they were used to at the time. While it took some years to bed down—and a new Real Property Act had to be passed less than three decades later to clean up the legislative accretions that had arisen in the interim—it has been an outstanding gift to South Australia. And, in due season, the landbroking and real estate agent community coalesced into an enduring association

From 32 licensed landbrokers in the 1870s, within a decade there were 87 and, barring the boom and bust of the early colonial economy, the profession has steadily grown ever since. Among those early land agents were various names familiar to South Australians even today: people like Charles Hextall Treloar, Theodore Bruce and Charles Matters, who was of course Muriel's uncle and followed on from his mother in acquiring land, eventually establishing Matters and Company.

The consolidation of growth, and a royal commission into surveying errors that had caused a public scandal, led the emerging sector in 1919 to establish an industry association, the Association of Licensed Auctioneers and Licensed Landbrokers, which endures today as the Real Estate Institute of South Australia (REISA). It was 80 years since South Australia's first property sold but, as history has shown, there was plenty left to do. As the state and Adelaide continued to grow, so did the institute. By 1968, the institute had a full-time secretariat in its own tenanted premises.

Membership of the institute trebled during the 1960s, rising to 573 individual and 105 corporate members in 1969, and no wonder. By the late 1960s, Australia was devoting up to 5 per cent of its gross national product to building houses and flats, and South Australia was no exception During its long history, REISA has played a pivotal role in representing the industry to governments and delivering education, training and other initiatives that have supported the industry's development. The institute first lobbied the government in 1948 for the removal of wartime controls on housing sales.

Over time, the policy focus of the institute came to include licensing standards, weeding out unscrupulous land agents, franchising and other emerging competitive pressures, dealing with new discrimination laws, supporting new urban development, and the education and training of new realtors. From starting out representing local firms, the consolidation of the real estate market in the 1980s nationally has transformed REISA's role, and by 1989 nearly 30 per cent of firms in South Australia belonged to national franchising or marketing groups. This caused a fundamental shift in the institute's role, with many head franchise and marketing offices wanting to train and instil their own points of difference.

Like much of life, accepting change is an essential component of survival. From a humble, unregulated beginning, REISA now works hand in glove with governments of all stripes and has renewed and strengthened its role in South Australia's civil society. I congratulate and thank the Real Estate Institute of South Australia for its dedicated work.