At a time of life when most business people spend an increasing amount of time on the golf course, 64-year-old Robert Jordan has bought back his company.

Ben Rooth discovers that there's no stopping him.

THERE have been many defining moments in property letting maestro Robert Jordan's life. But the common strand between these moments - both happy and unhappy - is that he has never failed to embrace the opportunities which have resulted and maximise their potential.

Nowhere is his resilience better evidenced than when Robert emerged from semi-retirement in April to buy back the company he founded in 1990 - Jordan's Home Rental Specialists.

Property firm Erinaceous Group paid him £2.8m for the eight offices in 2004.

He paid Erinaceous - which breached its banking covenants in 2007 - "around one-tenth" of that amount to retrieve it at the start of the year. Erinaceous went into administration in April.

Robert tells me that his reasons for doing this were many. For a start, he fully believes that there is still "immense mileage" in the rental sector and the current economic state could well result in more people than ever opting to rent rather than buy.

Additionally, he felt a great sense of responsibility to the many staff who helped him build up the company in the first place - many of whom are still working for Jordan's today.

And one of the first things he did was make his son William - who was also a long-serving employee - managing director.

"Through sheer hard work and putting the old principles back in place, we were back in profit within three months," said Robert.

"One of the driving forces for me to take the company back on was to rescue it from the jaws of the administrators.

"In addition, many of the people who work here have been here for years and they have all responded to me taking the company back on with an immense amount of hard work.

"We now intend to consolidate our position within the rental market and, when the time is right, continue to grow the business. Most of my family think that I'm mad - but I've not had a moment of regret since I took the company back on.

"In many ways, I feel as though the lifetime's worth of business experience I've accrued have all been working towards this point."

Another highly significant turning point in Robert's life came when his mother passed away when he was just 16.

Through a variety of circumstantial twists of fate, he found himself living with his grandparents in Stockport.

And - quite unbeknown to him - his business career was about to get started.

"I just had to take a job - but the one thing that I knew with any real certainly was that I didn't want to follow in the footsteps of my father as an engineer," he explains.

"So I looked through the situations vacant section of the newspaper and decided to take a job as a rent collector for Samuel Rains and Son, which is now Reed Rains.

"I was collecting 2s 9d each week and many of the tenants could not afford it. There was no money about, so properties were patched up and many had earth floors, outdoor toilets and roofs that leaked.

"I found two tenants dead - poor housing must have been a contributory factor."

During his seven years with Rains, Robert qualified through correspondence course as a chartered surveyor with the College of Estate Management, which is now the University of Reading.

Robert adds that his experiences while working there also helped shape him into the person he is today - and an ethical and honourable approach remains at the heart of his business life.

After graduating in 1966, Robert went on to become head of commercial and professional property services at estate agency J R Bridgeford, managing director of Dean Smith and north regional chairman of Hambro Countrywide's commercial division. In 1990, the opportunity arose for Robert to buy Hambro's lettings division for £100,000 - which he describes as another turning point.

Back then, this was a bizarre move given that the business, by his own admission, was a shambles and the lettings market had yet to be professionalised.

"There was an element of luck about the success, I accept that," he adds. "But I like to think that the success the business enjoyed was also about timing and a fair amount of professional knowledge."

Now he's firmly back at the company's helm, Robert says that he is dedicating much of his time in the office to formulating "strategy". For example, he has high hopes for a new scheme which Jordan's has launched called rent-to-buy.

"I firmly believe that its success could place it on a par with the buy-to-let schemes which have proved so popular over the past decade," he adds.

"Given the current state of the market - with the scarcity of mortgages - I think that this option could prove to be the perfect product to enable people to get a foothold on the property ladder.

"The tenant pays the normal market rent but what they get in addition is a binding option to buy the property for a pre-agreed price after a set period of time.

"The tenant has to pay an option fee and they get some of the rent they have paid knocked off the price.

"They pay the pre-agreed price regardless of whether the housing market has risen or fallen back in the intervening time.

"Effectively, this means that everyone is happy - the landlord gets his money each month and is able to sell the property. The tenant is able to buy the property they want for a price they want to pay."

Robert believes that schemes like this will result in Jordans remaining at the cutting edge of property letting.

And while he is able to keep on seizing those opportunities he has absolutely no intention of retiring. In fact, there's just no stopping him.