Les Calvert, Director and founder, Property Abroad

Feb 2 2010 By Jez Davison, Evening Gazette

He's never seen the need to limit his own horizons, and for the past six years he's been widening others' with an online overseas property portal that's given him the most fun he's ever had. Jez Davison met Les Calvert.

IT HAS taken more than two decades, but Les Calvert has finally found some job satisfaction.

The Hartlepool entrepreneur’s kaleidoscopic career had included gentleman’s tailor, flogging fruit and veg, holiday repping and taxi driving before he finally hit on the overseas property market.

The director and founder of Property Abroad has the Financial Times to thank for kick-starting the on-line company that owns more than 400 property and holiday-based domain names and generates £120,000 profit on a £256,000 turnover.

“I’d bought property-abroad.com while I was working for someone else and I hadn’t really done a lot with it,” he recalls. “Then the FT rang up asking to speak to my press office - they’d Googled overseas property and found us in first position! I thought: how can they take me seriously?”

That’s the moment he spotted the real potential of a business that advertised overseas properties for sale, auction or rent.

After touting agents all over the world to advertise on the site, he launched Property Abroad as a limited company in 2003 from the back bedroom of his Hartlepool home in Eden Park.

Soon he was picking up other domain names like sweeties - cruise-search.com, estateagentsabroad.com and mobilehomesabroad.com among them - to capitalise on an economic boom in which cash-rich consumers shelled out fortunes on swanky second homes and exotic breaks.

Then the property bubble burst with an almighty bang.

“Traditionally property values have doubled every seven years. People are still buying if they can get the funds,” says Les. “The credit crunch was brought about by lenders lending too much on a whim.”

But he stuck with it and Les’ websites survived. They currently advertise more than 170,000 properties in over 100 countries, while Property Abroad still ranks in the top 10 Google search for overseas property, despite competition from others such as Rightmove.

He’s watching immature markets “with good travel in them”, such as Brazil, Chile, Europe’s Eastern Bloc and Germany, where low home ownership (around four in 10) has kept a lid on prices and mortgage repayments.

Meanwhile, he’s opening new doors.

Last year, he launched IT firm Plaggy Media with two former colleagues and he’s also gearing up to buy a Teesside-based leisure facility for a six-figure sum.

It’s a long way from his days as a wet-behind-the-ears sales assistant for gentleman’s clothing company GA Dunn & Co where he started at 16.

“I saw school as an inconvenience”, he says. “I couldn’t wait to get started in the real world.”

He left retail to join travel agent Thomas Cook as a foreign exchange cashier and went on to become a holiday rep on the Greek Island of Kos.

Returning to the North-east, he took a role in car giant Nissan’s service and warranty department before opening up a sweet shop in Hartlepool’s Elwick Road, selling it for around £7,500 in the early 1990s.

Then he bought Ovington’s fruit and veg shop “for peanuts”, re-branding the business Fresh Fruits and diversifying into dried fruits, milk and sandwiches.

Meanwhile, he’d bought two cars to kick-start a local taxi service, which mushroomed into a fleet of more than 20 vehicles when he purchased BJ’s taxi firm - re-branded Sovereign Taxis - in the mid-1990s.

By then he had sold Fresh Fruits and was ready to buy into the travel industry, launching Sovereign Travel to operate a coach shuttle to France via the channel tunnel for around £8 a seat.

As business grew - the service was running five or six times a day at its peak - Les moved the operation to Dover but a Channel Tunnel fire scorched demand. He abandoned the venture and came back home.

Undaunted, he threw his energy into the taxi operation, building it into a profitable business before selling up to one of his driver colleagues in 2000.

Oakley Travel then offered him a route back into the one industry where “I’d had the most fun”. Les quickly set about developing the firm’s internet offering, heading up the IT department in Sunderland.

All the while, he was busy building his own platform, property-abroad.com, which he took on full-time in 2005 when he left Oakley. He put the business on the market previously for £575,000 before an eleventh-hour change of heart, making it one of the longest stints in an otherwise peripatetic career.

“I always knew I didn’t want to work for anyone else. That’s why I never stayed in any job for long.”