After 45 years in the commercial property industry, Dorset’s Simon West has done what he thought he’d never do – retire.
The high-respected corporate property advisor was the West in the Dorset-based partnership Cowling & West, which was established in 1985 with David Cowling before merging with national property consultancy Vail Williams in 2021.
A Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Simon, 68, is a familiar figure to many businesspeople across the region, specialising in general agency, development and investment work.
He has provided impeccable advice to landlords, investors and workplace occupiers over six decades, having passed surveyor qualifications at what was then Oxford Polytechnic and is now Oxford Brookes University.
Simon’s inaugural deal in 1978 was for new employer Goadsby & Harding, leasing an industrial unit to a double glazing firm, Seyward Windows – the business is still trading from the same premises at Nuffield Industrial Estate, Poole.
That deal was bookended with his last one just before this Christmas, a lease renewal for a body repair shop at Yeomans Industrial Park, behind the Castlepoint shopping centre in Bournemouth.
After leaving Goadsby & Harding’s industrial property department, “with the exuberance of youth” to broaden career horizons, he set his sights on London where his surveyor friends were carving out careers.
“I actually got no further than Southampton,” Simon chuckled.
He worked for a commercial property consultancy which “taught me everything about how not to run a business and proved to be a very useful education”.
He jumped ship when he opened the office letterbox mail to find a letter from the bank containing his salary cheque – it had been returned after bouncing.
There was a silver lining – Simon was very quickly asked by another property consultancy to establish a market presence in Bournemouth; enough impressed clients made setting up Cowling & West in December 1985 a sensible start-up proposition.
“We had a lot of traction and the second half of the 1980s was a boom period for Cowling & West, with significant growth in a very positive market – you could not build and let property quick enough.”