Dr Russell Schiller, property research guru and former Hillier Parker partner, has died aged 66 after a long battle with cancer.
As a trained economist and geographer, Schiller brought an academic rigour to property research.
“He was one of the architects of property research back when people didn’t really do research,” recalls Don Newell, who was senior partner at Hillier Parker until 1997. “But his main talent was that he managed to make it interesting.
“I used to tell our staff that we dealt with the most exciting part of the business world – and yet we made it sound dull. Russell took something very technical and dusty and made it gripping.”
In an interview with EG in 1997, Schiller said that he was born to be a property researcher. “I had a first love for location geography, the population of towns…I used to do all sorts of charts and things.”
He remembered being “absolutely thrilled” as a 13-year old when his father bought him a copy of the 1951 census figures.
Schiller joined Hillier Parker as an economist after working for nine years at the Thomson Organisation, which was then the owner of The Sunday Times and Yellow Pages.
During his time at Thomson, he completed a part-time PhD in Shopping Models. At Hillier Parker, he set-up the firm’s research department, and qualified as a chartered surveyor soon after.
In 1976, some notes by Schiller on the sudden profusion of jeans shops on Oxford Street made front-page news in the Evening Standard.
Conversely, the Rent Index, a ground-breaking piece of work in scale and methodology which Schiller and his team at HP published the same year, was largely overlooked at the time.
This experience taught Schiller his golden rule of property research, recalled by Newell, who says: “The average document he wanted to produce was one double side of A4.
“You do the research and you spend time on it, he said, but the end result should just be a good read and relevant.”
Schiller became an equity partner in the 1980s but retired from the partnership in 1996, and subsequently worked part-time as a consultant.
In 1984 he was made honorary professor of Land Economy at the University of Aberdeen, while in 2001 he published The Dynamics of Property Location, described by reviewers as being “imbued with a strong practical sense” – the culmination of his childhood passion for maps and statistics.
“He was a true pioneer,” said Andrew Baum, part-time professor of Land Management at the University of Reading and managing director of Oxford Property Consultants.
Schiller was Baum’s supervisor for his PhD. “He was one of the first guys to bring academic disciplines to property. He imposed the standards which remain today.”
References: EGi News 14/10/04
