Armed with shorthand and typing skills, the school-leaver headed to The Courier for a cadetship as a young reporter.

But it was not to be. Knocked back at Ballarat's newspaper, young Neville was left looking for work when fate came knocking, in the shape of an estate agent's gavel.

Now 70, and retired for sometime, Mr Lewis said he saw an ad in the paper for another job.

"I saw an ad in The Courier for a real estate, reception, and office work-type job, and as I had the skills of shorthand and typing, the agent - PV Sullivan and Company - did a background check on me... there were 49 girls and I was the only bloke applying for the job, and I got it!

"They were in Lydiard Street South, just down a bit from Her Majesty's, number 27. I was with them for 10 years, until I left in 1978 and joined Dalgety's, the stock and station agency."

Dalgety and Company (later Dalgety Ltd and Dalgety Plc) was Australia's most powerful stock and station agency for most of the 20^th Century, and Mr Lewis stayed with them for the rest of his career, retiring in 2015.

"I was their real estate man there, they had blokes selling, stock and merchandise and insurance, but for the first five years I was doing houses in Ballarat plus small acreages, up to 100 acres," he says.

"In 1973 they said to me, 'It's all open slather to you now, you can do everything,' and I got out of the houses and concentrated on the farms, on the bigger properties."

While Mr Lewis has been involved in buying and selling some of the biggest properties around Ballarat - there's a photo of him outside Creswick's Snizort - the biggest sale was further afield.

He handled the mortgagee dispersal of the Robertson properties in Moolort, outside of Carisbrook in 2013.

"It was a massive sale, it cleared about $7 million all up. It was held at the Carisbrook Football Club rooms and there was big crowd there that day."

Mr Lewis has written a book about his almost 50 years in the real estate industry, from the days of agents having to take their own pictures of the properties to the massive computer sites of today.

But aside from the obvious technological shifts, the greatest change Mr Lewis has seen is the growth of prices in the market.

"Just in the five-and-a-half years I've been retired, it's gone up considerably, and I think it will keep going up, absolutely," Mr Lewis says.

"Everything is buoyant: farming, you've got high prices for sheep and lambs and cattle; grain's pretty good, and the season's been excellent, an excellent season for grass and crops. And the other big thing is, interest rates are very low. And that's a big difference to when we were in the early '80s."

Neville Lewis's My 47 years In Real Estate is only available by contacting Neville on 0409 886 492. The entire proceeds of the sale will be donated to 3BA's Christmas Appeal for 2020.