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From punch-ups with tenants to dastardly deposit thefts, these are the stories of the historical women who paved the way for female real estate agents today.
When Leanne Pilkington was announced as the president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia (REIA) in December last year, it was the first time in the institute’s 100-year history that the REIA had seen an all-female leadership team.
While women in leadership roles may still be struggling to break the glass ceiling, women’s presence in the Australian property sector is nothing new.
Exactly a century ago, in 1924, the Daily Telegraph reported that a Melbourne woman named Elizabeth Griffiths was sent to court for attempting to apply for a licence as a real estate agent.
In spite of objectors’ claims that Griffiths was “merely acting as a dummy for her husband”, her real estate licence was successfully granted.
Griffiths was not the first, or only, Australian woman to make a successful imprint in the real estate world.
As early as 1913, just five years after Victoria granted non-Indigenous women the right to vote, a Melbourne woman named K. Gardner “was one of the first women to invade the business world of this city” when she started a real estate agency under her own name, according to The Age.
Female real estate agents sometimes find themselves coming before the court.
In 1953, the Courier-Mail reported that a “woman estate agent” had stolen £800 from client deposits on Brisbane suburban homes – a whopping $34,000 in today’s money.
The agent, “plump, grey-haired Irene Philomene Anderson”, pleaded not guilty to the charge, in spite of the judge’s pointed comments about her husband’s criminal history.
It wasn’t only sales agents who ended up in sticky situations. In 1933, a female property manager alleged she was punched by a tenant when collecting the rent.
The property manager, Katherine Agnes Dougherty-Keighery, stated she had arrived at the Williamstown home of one of her tenants, a couple named Mr and Mrs Leathers. After a heated conversation about the form of cheque the agency could accept, the property manager stated in the Williamstown Advertiser that Mr Leathers “rushed round the corner of the house, grabbed the cheque with his left hand, and with his right he struck [the] witness a violent blow on the chest”.
Despite two eyewitnesses and a police report, the all-male court dismissed the charge, stating that “the defendant’s hand slipped”.
For many women in the past, taking the plunge into real estate was essential for the survival of themselves and their family.
In 1919, a Western Australian woman named T. H. Blake found herself in a tough spot when her husband suddenly died, leaving her alone with five children to support.
Remembering the accounting and investment lessons that she had learnt alongside her late husband, Blake started up her own real estate business just three months after his death.
At first, Blake showed her clients properties with a horse-drawn cart, but she eventually upgraded to a car.
As well as being the first female real estate agent in Western Australia, Blake was the first Western Australian woman to become a member of REIA, leading a 1939 edition of the Daily News to state she “carved out a career for herself in what had previously been regarded as purely masculine territory”.
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