Property managers and the Gold Coast

A commercial listing of property managers in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, sets out the job in the businesses' own words.

The listing describes property inspections and reports, matching suitable tenants to homes, and supervising repairs and maintenance, along with communicating with landlords and tenants. It also carries the businesses' accounts of their years in the industry, their awards from a real estate institute, and the service they say they give.

The Darwin listing shows what businesses put forward when they are pitching for that work: length of time in the industry, membership of a professional institute, awards and long-standing clients.

Those claims come from the businesses themselves.

Several clans of the Yugambeh people, among them the Kombumerri, Mununjali and Wangerriburra, have their ancestral home on the Gold Coast. Europeans arrived in 1823, when the explorer John Oxley travelled the Tweed River, and in the middle of the 19th century timber from the hinterland drew people to the area. Nerang, which grew earliest among the small townships, was established in 1865. By 1875 the settlement at Nerang Heads had been surveyed and renamed Southport, and it became known as a quiet holiday place for wealthy Brisbane residents.

After the First World War, seaside shacks went up along the South Coast, many put together from disused timber, fibro cement, metal containers or farm sheds, and even old trams. After the Surfers Paradise Hotel opened in the late 1920s, the region grew. The strip was known as the South Coast, because it lay south of Brisbane, and the nickname 'Gold Coast' came into use from 1950; locals at first thought the name belittling. In 1958 the South Coast became the Town of Gold Coast, and it was proclaimed a city in 1959. The city has 70 kilometres of coastline and a hinterland to the west.