Born in Bristol in 1954, I was raised in Surrey, starting in property at an early age as I worked in my father’s architectural practice during school holidays.

At school I managed to fit in enough study around my squash and hockey (school hockey captain) to secure my place at Nottingham Trent University, then more humbly named Trent Polytechnic, to read for an honours degree in Urban Estate Surveying.  I continued my obsession for hockey, captaining the polytechnic team and playing club and county juniors, adding to it an obsession, still held, for a law student and SU treasurer who I subsequently married.

I qualified as a Chartered Surveyor (ARICS) in 1978 and was awarded membership of FIABCI, the International Real Estate Federation, for a prize paper on the property investment market.

After period working for Weatherall Green & Smith’s west-end investment department, Collier & Madge in the City of London and Allsop’s valuation department, I became a partner at Harrison Goaté and Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS).  As a niche practice, based in London, our work for clients such as Land Securities, Country & New Town Properties, Inter-IKEA, Nordbanken, and a wide range of occupiers, took us all over the UK and occasionally beyond with valuations and advice provided from the San Francisco Shopping Centre to a goat farm (to be a golf and redsidential development) in Western Australia.

After 15 years at Harrison Goaté, latterly as managing partner, I sought a new challenge and a break from commuting. There followed three years based in Bath setting up a property company for a former client.  We successfully acquired and developed commercial properties across the South and Midlands and developed Schooner Bay, a magnificent beach-front apartment complex on the golden west coast of Barbados.

Returning to the South-east, I commenced business in 2002 as Robert John Associates, providing service to clients in the key areas of Landlord & Tenant, Investments and Dilapidations.  I renewed my links with John Goaté, regularly working as a consultant to Harrison Goaté.   More recently, I was pleased to be selected by the RICS as an Accredited Mediator. I am a great advocate of Mediation as a non-confrontational means of settling disputes whether in the property business, other commercial areas or private life.

Whilst primarily working alone, I also have a network of specialist consultants to call upon for their expert skills in rating, architecture, building, management etc and to bring together as ad-hoc teams for specific projects.

Somehow, along the way, Christine and I managed to produce two wonderful and successful daughters and I transferred my obsession with hockey via golf to gliding.  I have a high performance two seat glider that I share with a small syndicate of friends, flying mostly from the London Gliding Club at Dunstable.  I’m also Vice-chairman of the British Gliding Association.  If you are frustrated with British sporting “almost" successes, check out the record of the British Gliding Team.  For many years they have been able to proudly boast that they really are the best in the world!