‘Property is all about people, and there's a huge amount of emotion involved’ - Alex Goldstein on 20 years in the property sector

“I suppose I'm one of those rare individuals nowadays, where all I know is property because it's all I’ve ever done,” he says.

“I hand on heart couldn't tell you what I would be doing otherwise, I genuinely couldn't answer.”

Goldstein was brought up in Marlow, West of London, great grandson to Louis Cope who owned the eponymous Harrogate department store famed for dressing wealthy women of 1920s North Yorkshire.

“That's my link back to Yorkshire, so I suppose I can argue that I’m a Northerner or a Southerner depending on the company,” Goldstein jokes.

Goldstein’s first steps into property came through work experience at a local estate agents, near Marlow.

What began as two weeks of work experience extended into two months and led to Goldstein deciding to pursue a career in property straight out of his degree at Durham university.

He then went on to work at Cluttons, in Oxford, where he was offered a position on the day of his interview.

After a year working at the firm, Goldstein was promoted to the businesses head office, located in London’s Berkeley Square.

“It was an amazing address,” he says, “I was up on the top floor overlooking Berkeley Square itself.

“So you can imagine, a guy in his early 20s, I work in Berkeley Square, live in Notting Hill, and I deal with multi-million pound properties nationally, it was very good times.”

After starting his career in London, Goldstein would move to Yorkshire for a job with Strutt and Parker, based in Harrogate, shortly before being hired at Knight Frank.

20 years on from his early days at Cluttons, Goldstein now runs his own consultancy, aptly titled Alex Goldstein Property Consultants.

It is the personal aspects of working in property that have kept him interested through the years.

“Property is all about people, and there's a huge amount of emotion involved, ” he says.

“You’re getting to genuinely help people, and guide them through what is one of the most stressful things you can do in life, and I dare say people are quite vulnerable in that situation.

“You’re in a very privileged position to be part of the most private quarters of someone’s life, and you’re helping them buy something that they will probably own for 15 to 20 years and beyond.

“That's why I get out of bed in the morning. It's the genuine ability to help people.”

This personal touch, Goldstein believes, is what many modern, online focussed estate agents have failed to grasp.

“The biggest thing for me – and it's always been drilled into me – is that property is a people business,” he says.

“There are many online agents country wide that I could list who have tried to disrupt the industry but haven't succeeded, and it all comes back to that, its people, and that has always been the case.”

Goldstein’s comments come after February of this year saw online estate agent Purple Bricks issue a profit warning, along with a strategic review which could lead to the sale of the company.

“A lot of these businesses try to make it more a retail environment, but property doesn’t like that, it's an incredibly unusual industry because it's driven by emotion, and a lot of these disrupters use technology,” Goldstein adds.

“Technology thinks in straight lines, but when you’re working with property there's high amounts of emotion, high amounts of money and high amounts of stress, and when you put that in a melting pot all sorts of random directions start to ping off that no amount of technology can predict.”

One of Goldstein’s best decisions to date, he notes, was to work across Yorkshire and London. “When I started out I was very much in a niche working across both Yorkshire and London,” he says. “When I first set up people thought I was absolutely mad, they just didn't get it.

“But I said ‘just wait, the wave has already started and it's coming.’

“And that is what's happened, covid effectively fast forwarded things, but now people want to work from home and have a family unit up in Yorkshire where there's a great quality of life, and commute down to London or Manchester or Leeds or wherever it might be.

“Now when I say I’m London and Yorkshire people really get it, and think it's an inspired move because there is so much activity coming out of the South.”

This trend is also one of the reasons Goldstein says he remains confident about the Yorkshire property market, even in a time of economic uncertainty.

“I know there's a lot of gloom and doom stories out there, but look back historically, covid, the financial crisis, Yorkshire has always held its own and we’ve always bucked the trend.

“As well as people from London and the home counties relocating North bound, we’ve had international money coming into the area with Yorkshire expats coming home.

“At the moment you’ve also got high demand for buyers but not a lot of property. There's not a lot of stock coming out onto the market - so when the right property at the right price comes onto the market - away you go.

“The market isn't what it was roaring away a year ago, but we’re certainly holding strong. Ignore the more general statistics and these national comments. We’re Yorkshire, and we’ll hold our own.”