Victor Negrine, R & W Commercial Eastern Suburbs

Victor Negrine is a Sydney Eastern Suburbs boy, born and bred. “You couldn’t ask for a better place to grow up really, could you?,” he asks rhetorically. “I grew up in Bondi. I was at the beach during my school years and teenage years; I was skateboarding and I had my BMX bike. I obviously haven’t ventured too far from being born and bred in Bondi, and now the Junction is my backyard for work.”

The Bondi Junction ‘backyard’ is where Victor wheels and deals as a commercial real estate agent for R&W Commercial Eastern Suburbs. “The thing that I love and makes me get up every day, I think, is that each deal is different. Each negotiation I do is different, each character I deal with for that negotiation is different, and that’s hard to have in a job that’s not too monotonous and doesn’t do your head in. So the beauty of my game is that each deal and negotiation is different to the one prior.”

Victor has witnessed the growth of Bondi Junction over the course of his career. “Obviously there’s been a huge amount of development in the last 10, 15, 20 years, with Westfield being the biggest of all of that. That’s where I saw a major change [to the Junction] with Westfield coming in; Westfield gives it a heartbeat. Everyone — retailers and people coming into the area — wants to be a close to Westfield as possible.”

Victor’s initial career was to be a stockbroker, following in his dad’s footsteps who pulled him out of school ahead of his HSC because he was ‘looking out the window’ and got him a job on the stock market. “Initially I was walking the streets delivering contract notes — there was no email back then. Eventually I worked my self up as a trader on the trading floor; I was on the floor for the crash of ’87, I was a phone clerk that day,” Victor recalls. In 1990, he was retrenched and had to choose a new career path: hospitality or real estate. “I ended up choosing real estate because knowing I wanted to have a family in time, hospitality would be long hours and at night and I thought, ‘nah, that’s not me’ and so I went down the path of real estate. I did the TAFE course before I got a job in real estate. I was actually working in hospitality at night and doing TAFE during the day; I wanted to get qualified first before getting into the industry.”

Away from the wheeling and dealing, you’re most likely to find Victor at home (with wife Suzie and their two daughters) and in the kitchen. “I am in the kitchen, because I love the kitchen. My mum was always in the kitchen and I was always hanging around the food growing up with mum. God love her, she’s not here anymore; I picked up a lot of recipes from her. I love to have people over and entertain and make amazing food for guests on the weekend. When I don’t have things for the kids on, I do like to have people over and cook up,” he says.

And what does Victor like to cook up? “I’m a bit of a mixed bag; I like a bit of everything. From the Mediterranean through the Greek through the Asian mix — that’s what I make for the kids: from a spinach pie to yemista to a stir-fry with noodles.”