Con Polites, Adelaide’s king of real estate

BACK in the news after a desecration of his grave, Con Polites literally left his mark on Adelaide. So who was he? Here’s a look back at his remarkable rise from market gardener to the king of real estate.

Adelaide millionaire and real estate tycoon Con Polites in 1996.

• Family feud suspected as Adelaide real estate king’s grave desecrated

BACK in the news after a macabre and disgusting desecration of his grave, Con Polites has been at rest for 15 years. So who was the property tycoon that literally left his mark on Adelaide? Here’s a look back at his remarkable rise to from market gardener to the king of the city’s real estate.

This piece was originally published in The Advertiser in 2001, in the days after his death.

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SURPRISINGLY, one of Adelaide’s most successful property tycoons, Con Polites, once summed up life this way: “Life is not money. It is like a flower that blooms then dies’’.

The Port Pirie market gardener’s son, who became one of Adelaide’s richest men, died of heart failure on Saturday, aged 82.

The Polites name adorns buildings around the city but Mr Polites wanted to be remembered most as “a good person’’. His son, George, who takes over the Polites Princes Group, says his father got his wish.

“He was married to my mother (Florence) for 56 years and he always showed her ultimate respect and care, as he did for his children and as he did for many, many other people,’’ he said yesterday.

“He was a businessman and a man’s man from the old school of thinking, where principles applied that people just let go today. He was a good person.’’

Premier John Olsen described Con as “a man who always saw the best in a person and who never forgot his past’’.

“Con was always positive and confident about the potential of Adelaide and South Australia,’’ Mr Olsen said.

“And despite his outstanding success he was also a very humble man, very human, in that he took up the plight of individuals less fortunate than himself and he did it without fanfare, just a desire to lend a helping hand.’’

Con Polites with two of his Rolls Royces in 1986.

The Polites family migrant story began in Darwin where Mr Polites’ parents fled from the island of Marci to escape invading Turks in 1915.

Mr Polites was born at Port Pirie in 1919, where the family had settled to grow peas, potatoes, tomatoes and other small crops.

As with the Lebanese and Italian South Australians, they came to a new world with no hope of returning to the old.

Dirt poor with at the best only rudimentary English, they grew and sold vegetables, fished, did the hard graft in the Port Pirie smelters. The bright and the lucky made the leap in a generation. Con Polites was a supreme example.

He had a network through the close-knit community of Greeks from the island of Kastellorizo off the Turkish mainland.

Con Polites in his Adelaide office in 2000.

By the age of 16 he had made enough money to buy his first deli freehold, but before a successful career in real estate many other career moves were to come.

In Adelaide, he worked at Woolworths behind a counter. At the time World War II began he managed a staff of 60 at the Finsbury munitions factory. He diversified into taxis, wedding car hire and catering. Mr Polites’ business interests also took him to Sydney where he developed retail businesses in cars, television and service stations.

But he returned in 1959 married to Florence and with the finances to become a real estate phenomenon. He had made his first million by 1964, characterising his success as the result of “energy, determination, consistency’’.

Preferring not to build new, Mr Polites renovated the old, tenanting — often to migrants at discount prices — before selling the buildings again when the time was right. At the height of his business empire Mr Polites ran 67 companies.

Con Polites leans on his Rolls Royce, 1989.

He started small, closed a hard bargain and became Adelaide’s best-known middle-level developer of the 1970s.

Kambitsis Group developer George Kambitsis said that while many ethnic groups contributed to the post-war development of Adelaide, none had a higher profile or more influence than the Greeks — Con Polites prominent among them.

“Traditionally in Greece after the world wars, property was seen as a safe haven and, for many migrants and people of Greek background who had lived through depression and war, they had seen money and shares reduced to nothing whereas property and gold hedged against disaster,’’ he said.

Property Council state president David Woolford said SA has lost an “icon’’.

“It was a huge (property) portfolio, if you look around the city,’’ he said of the Grecian blue and white Polites signs.

“Obviously he was proud of what he owned and wanted to tell the world.’’

Mr Woolford described Mr Polites as “an astute businessman’’.

“He said to me one day that he ran his business as if it were a recession and you don’t extend yourself,’’ he recalled.

In the 1980s, Adelaide City Council’s Deputy Lord Mayor, Michael Harbison, was outdone by Mr Polites at property auctions.

Con Polites in 1994.

As a younger man in 1966.

“He was the idol of all young entrepreneurs in Adelaide,’’ Mr Harbison says. “The frisson of excitement as Con’s Rolls-Royce would pull up midway through a real estate auction was something to behold. He’d walk through, peruse the documents, gazump everybody and leave us all gobsmacked.’’

Mr Harbison says Mr Polites had a unique aura, with his sunglasses, gold jewellery and “huge walrus moustache’’.

“He was one of the larger-than-life characters,’’ he says.

“He was also a very generous man to people in need but buying property and never selling it in a growing state was a good decision. The values just went up and up and up.’’

It was once said that no other city in the world — except Pyongyang where images and the name of the late Kim Il Sung adorn buildings — carried the mark of one man more than Adelaide.

Mr Polites explained that the signs he hung from buildings were not to advertise his wealth but show Australians that Greek migrants were friendly and happy to be part of the community.

Mr Polites also bought residential investments and mansions at Pasadena and the Esplanade, at Somerton Park.

Con Polites in a suburban warehouse, where he financed the drilling to look for the remains of the missing Beaumont children, Jane, Arnna and Grant.

At one time he owned a different Rolls-Royce for each day of the week and was for decades the most recognisable figure with flashing gold jewellery, his trademark hat (he owned 50 at one time) and moustache. He once explained the moustache as being the product of a lost $2 bet with a mate but said he kept it because it “helped get the birds’’ and made him look older and more credible.

George Polites said his father was much bigger than the empire he built.

“The legacy of Con Polites is not just something that can be described by numbers of buildings,’’ he said.

“It’s the help, the drive, the knowledge, the training that he instilled within many, many, many people that’s enabled them to branch off and go their own way.

“The business will be running exactly the same way it has been run and they were his wishes.’’

Mr Polites always vowed not to retire and die in the job, but bypass surgery in 1991 shocked him into keeping a closer watch on his health.

“I do what the doctors tell me now,’’ he told The Advertiser the following year.

“After all, you can’t fight God, can you?’’

George Polites said his father had 10 good years after the surgery.

“He attended doctors on a regular basis and specialists became his friends. He spent a lot of time dedicating his energies into trying to prolong his life from there.’’