Ella Dunphy opened her auctioneering business despite having no experience working in property.

“I mean, when you’re opening your office and you’ve only got maybe three properties to put in the window, you’re kind of thinking: ‘Oh my God, where does this start?’”

It may have been a scary beginning, but in June 2018 Ella will officially become the first female president of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers.

She was born and reared on a dairy farm in south Kilkenny. After school she completed a two-year course in business studies at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). Her first job was at farm-based Dutch fertiliser company Albatros Fertilizers Ltd, which was the biggest employer in New Ross at the time.

Ella then moved to ACC Bank in Kilkenny, where she worked for seven years. She got married and took a career break when the children were born, becoming a stay-at-home mum for 18 years. Her attitude towards staying at home with her children was that “if you could do it, you were going to do it. I mean obviously we wouldn’t have been the wealthiest couple in the world, with four small children under five, but we got by.” When the children were “educated, or in college anyway”, Ella decided to go back to third level herself – and found herself back in WIT for round two. This time she completed a two-year diploma in valuations and auctioneering.

“I liked property, I loved reading about it – it’s always intriguing to the outside world watching houses and seeing what’s happening from a price point of view,” says Ella, but she says she was “as nervous as a kitten” going back to college.

“I used to ring my older boys on my way back from college because I would hardly even understand the instructions I was given about assignments and indexing and all of that. It was all just so new.”

After this, Ella kept doing more add-on courses in relation to valuations and building studies, until she felt she had sufficient professional knowledge to throw her “hand in the ring” and opened her own business in 2003. But she had never worked in property herself and says “people thought I was mad”.

New beginnings

She says she got plenty of flack.

“The negatives – they mightn’t have said them to me directly, but they always came back in a message. But do you know something, I think when you’re old enough to be able to take it you just decide you can see there’s a bigger picture here ... it makes you hungrier to succeed.”

She wanted to be her own boss.

“I felt if I worked for myself I’d have some reasonable flexibility, and I suppose that was the appeal more than anything.”

And Ella had one particular weapon in her arsenal: “I actually had gone to college in recent times and had qualified, whereas a lot of the guys were in either inherited businesses or they were there for a long time and none of them had kind of upskilled, so I had that advantage.”

Of course, she did receive a lot of goodwill and support. People dropped notes in under the door with messages such as: “I have a rental property and I’d love to give you that for a start”, “I’m going to be selling a house here, I’d love to give you a shot at it”.

“So maybe I might have gotten that from four or five different people, which was fantastic and you kind of nurture that and remember it forever.”

Ella says there was an element of luck in opening her business pre-boom.

“I never envisioned I would be as busy in the first years as I was. I always thought I’d be just a small, little- cottage industry, but it snowballed because of the Celtic Tiger. I mean, I started with one girl and suddenly we were six in staff within eight or nine months.”

She got herself on to bank mortgage valuation panels and county council valuation panels – she does a lot of work for the housing agencies and for social housing, some of it in a consultancy role.

Ella never stopped learning. She went back to IT Tallaght while working and became a European valuer.

“Essentially this is the minimum standard required by the Central Bank and indeed all banks are insistent that the TEGoVA or European Standard of valuing is going to be imperative going forward,” says Ella.

“Their standard of valuing is fantastic – it’s a very high level of valuing and a very strong and high level of reporting.

“Like all professional bodies, the European standard involves a large amount of study with compulsory continuous professional development and audits on an annual basis. Valuing in our industry is no longer for the faint-hearted, and has become a very specialised area of the business, requiring constant upskilling.”

Business hurdles

One major challenge Ella has met in her property career is the recession. Did she ever reach a point where she thought she might have to close her business?

“Do you know something, it actually never occurred to me that it could get that bad. I was lucky, I had a good rental business and even though rents weren’t high by any manner of means, it was a consistent income stream.”

Ella also completed cost-reduction exercises right across the business.

“In a nutshell, you watched every month end, and you paid your bills as good as you could, but you did watch every month end because there was nothing guaranteed. I think because of my maturity in business I just decided, keep my head down and just work through it. There was no point in my watching what one of the other auctioneers was selling. It was a case of me watching what I had and getting on with that – because sometimes you can lose sight of what you’re meant to be doing if you’re watching everybody else.”

This difficult economic period is now over and Ella’s career is soaring to new heights. She is on the council for the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers.

“There are 22 guys and me.”

This time next year she will be the first female president of the institute. She is currently the senior vice-president.

New perspectives

Her business is now also a family affair, with son Ciarán joining the ranks in 2008/2009.

“He was a breath of fresh air, both from a point of view of bringing young blood as well as fresh eyes and fresh thinking into the business,” explains Ella.

She is very keen to grow the agricultural side of the business – both agricultural land sales and land letting.

“I wouldn’t get invited out to walk the land and put a value on it, generally speaking, and I think it’s a perception that’s there, but I don’t think people realise that I’m well able to stick on the muddy boots and I’m not afraid of land. I mean, I was reared on a dairy farm.”

Despite all she’s already achieved, we get the impression Ella has many more ambitions to fulfil. And she’s driven by a genuine love for what she does.

“What I like most about it is the unpredictability of it, insofar as you never know on any given day who’s going to ring you to carry out a calculation on some very exciting property, or it mightn’t be something exciting, but it’s something challenging and I really embrace new challenges. I love new challenges.” CL