Matthew Gardiner Legge
- Estate Agent
- Matthew Gardiner Legge EXP
- Trinity
“I’ve been around the block a few times and have only releatively recently arrived in Oxford five years ago having previously lived in London, Spain and Gibraltar and the West Country (Exeter) before that. I now live in Central Oxford with my wife who is Head at Oxford High for Girls and my Greyhound. I’m a member at Falcon Boat Club where I am a fair weather rower (having done a lot of competition stuff in my younger years). My current happy place is on a sailing boat and me and the missus own a fifth share in a Sun Odyysee 32′ sailing boat based in the Ionian (Greece). Children: three flown-the-nest stepdaughters.”
I have been working in property – mainly estate agency – pretty much all my working life. I started in the West country in the late eighties on the well beatien track from rookie sales negotiator to branch manager of an excellent independent company in Devon (Exmouth, Chudleigh/Dartmoor?Teignmouth until 1994 when I took a massive detour to go and live in Spain. There I started working selling property on th Costa Del Sol (Fuengirola) whilst also running an English Bar – The Sheffield Arms since you ask – which very much brought many adventures. This preceeded a spell doing timeshare in Marbella before getting a ‘grown up’ job as sales and marketing Director for Taylor Woodrow in Gibraltar where I sold luxury apartments and houses to various fiscally challenged international buyers. In 2005, I set up my own estate agency in Sotogrande, Spain (next to Gibraltar) before returning to the UK in 2008 when everything went terribly wrong – the great market crash.
I spent the next ten years working the Prime Central London market with various companies including well known brands – John D Wood and Jackson Stops before being dragged by my wife to Oxford where I decided to join the ever growing army of self-employed estate agents – something I wished I had done years ago. So, I am now an eXp agent, working under my own name and very happy doing so. The self-employed estate agency movement is probably the biggest (and best) shake up to the industry since the advent of didgital, specifically – Rightmove. Currently, I like to think I’m doing rather well but of course, there’s always room to do better!
