Miles has seen a lot of changes over the years

By Lethbridge Herald on May 23, 2025.

Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald

Miles Godlonton was looking for a job when he and friend Glen Bright spotted a couple of want ads in The Herald while having coffee at a restaurant in the old Heidelberg Inn.

One ad was for a job at 1090 CHEC radio; the other was for selling real estate.

Godlonton decided to apply for the real estate job while Bright went to CHEC and the rest is history. The manager of the real estate company knew Godlonton’s dad Mel and hired Miles.

As he celebrated his 70th birthday this week at Sisters Pub with friends and business associates, Godlonton looked back at a career now in its 50th year – all spent in Lethbridge, where he grew up and graduated from Lethbridge Collegiate Institute.

Godlonton has weathered many changes over the decades, including a  period of high interest rates in the late 1970s and early ‘80s which decimated the local real estate industry, costing many in the profession their jobs.

Godlonton started with Mountain Real Estate, now Melcor, which was based in Edmonton. The company was owned by Stan Mountain, who opened an office in Lethbridge.

Mountain bought all the land north of 26 Avenue Noth – wnow the Uplands subdivision – in the 1970s. The company then  sold its real estate operation to Royal LePage, Godlonton recalled.

After briefly moving to Royal Trust, where Bob Ackerman worked, Godlonton joined Re/Max in 1980 which had just moved to Lethbridge. He and fellow Re/Max salesman Gord Christensen were the first real estate team partnership in Canada. Said Godlonton.

He spent 25 years at Re/Max, buying the brokerage in 1990 before  selling it in 1995. He went out on his own in the early 2000s and now runs Godlonton Group with his son Ryan

Among the biggest changes in Lethbridge he saw was the growth of the condominium market. That market started with the development of Henderson Estates condos along Mayor Magrath Drive South.

“That was the first condominium resale project built in this city,” he recalled. “And then condominium market exploded. That was the initial densifying” in Lethbridge.

In the late 1970 and early ‘80s, people began buying apartment buildings and converting them to condos, he said. When interest rates reached 21 per cent, builders went broke here.

Godlonton remembers renting a job site trailer at a vacant property  where the Mayor Magrath Pizza Hut now sits and put signs on stating “Liquidation Sale” because everything was in foreclosure.

“We started the liquidation sale,” he said. “There’s only a handful of realtors that made it through those periods of time. The guys still licenced today are Brent Black and Andy Kent. There were maybe 10 survivors in the whole industry that made it through that high-interest time. But that’s what really got me going, because I was so committed to being the best I could be; I had to figure out a way to survive.”

Godlonton was the first real estate agent to have a personalized  licence plate – which the Herald wrote about at the time – and he was also the first to have a mobile phone in his car. HE recalled how the phone would honk loudly when calls came in.

His brick-sized mobile was in a Lincoln Town Car at first. Then he leased a Jaguar, which came with payments of $1,000 a month in 1983.

“I kept that a couple of years then got over it.”

Godlonton said he had five “really good” mentors in his car, particularly a trainer in California named Mike Ferry, whom he says saved his career. At the time, he was going through a deep depression that knocked him down.

“They didn’t save my ego,” he recalled. “My ego got too big. That really changed me.” 

Godlonton said he managed to keep his cockiness, but he wasn’t a braggart anymore.

A 1988 full-page ad in the Herald featuring Godlonton’s face, with just a quote by former Ford boss Lee Iaccoca, was inspired by an ad that ran widely across North America featuring that automaker’s leader, he recalled.

He took a lot of flack from his local competition over the ad, who called him an arrogant so-and-so, he said.

“But that’s how I built my career – from The Herald. I advertised more than the real estate companies advertised,” he recalled, mentioning  his fondness for former Herald publisher Don Doram and others. “I could go anywhere in that building.”

When land development was frozen in other areas of the city and focus turned to the westside, real estate agents literally had to lock potential customers in their vehicles and drive them across the Oldman River to look at homes, he said.

Customers would protest to Godlonton that they didn’t want to live in West Lethbridge but they always bought, he said.

“Nobody wanted to live over there.”

The market has changed in other ways, as well. Godlonton remembers rushing to get signatures as late as 11 p.m. because faxed copies weren’t legal at the time.

“You could fax copies of documents but you couldn’t fax signatures.”

Fast forward many years the real estate industry is facing other challenges, with interest rates again on the rise and inflation and affordability  issues for younger or first-time buyers. Many first-time buyers are getting help from parents and having co-signers, he said.

But Godlonton notes that real estate prices are relatively low in the city.

“We are so lucky here,” he said. “Our prices are high but we’ve got the cheapest prices in western Canada, outside of Medicine Hat.”