NAPOLEON WAS RIGHT

“This house believes that estate agency in its present form is

outmoded and has no credible basis for continuance”.

I’ve offered a variety of professional services over my forty-year career but I’ve whittled that down to just the one now which is leasehold enfranchisement.  On the face of it I might include estate agency in that list but I have to say, with some regret, that I wouldn’t classify that as a professional service.  It should be but it isn’t and to be frank, even though there has been much talk over the years of regulation and qualification requirements and standards, there’s no sign of it becoming so any time soon.  My thinking had been that by introducing my own professional standards born of qualification, experience, and natural inclination I would have some success in the matter.  I was wrong.

There are three main reasons why, after some years of substantively failed efforts, I gave up the ghost with estate agency.

1. It was too much like hard work for old bones.  Not the selling property part I hasten to add.  That bit really is quite straightforward.  No, it was the selling of the idea that you don’t now need to have been established in nineteen hundred and frozen to death or have some plate glass to sit behind to perform this task perfectly well in a digital world.  Whatever they may tell you all estate agents today are ‘online agents’, a phrase so frequently but unfairly associated with an imagined sub-class of practitioner only suitable for the lower echelons of the market.   Whether it be fear of failure, naivety, laziness or grandiosity I have never quite worked it out.  Whatever the reasoning, or combination of it, the selling public would seem to be committed to the idea of using anachronistic, and quite frankly ridiculously expensive, methods of sale.  And please don’t even talk to me about joint or multi agency which is a simple recipe in my view for wasting even more money for the privilege of looking desperate.

   
   

2. There’s too much compliance.  Not in terms of professional standards mind you but on such as anti-money laundering in particular.  A gravy train of bureaucracy if ever there was one.

   
   

3. It was too embarrassing.   In one moment I was transformed from being a respected professional and pillar of the community to a member of a trade where public respect, it must be said and fair comment, is very thin on the ground.

All this being the case I eventually had no real choice other than to give up the ghost and hand in my estate agent members card.  It was actually quite a relief if truth be told.  I would be lying though if I were to say that this business of estate agency and the way it is still being conducted doesn’t somehow stay with me as an itch I need to scratch.

Napoleon it was who opined that ‘if you want a thing done well, do it yourself’.  Admittedly he was an arrogant little so-and-so and there was quite obviously a high degree of irony in it given that the objective there was to conquer Europe by military force.  Nevertheless there was some undeniable truth in his hypothesis.  It has its limits of course and I would agree for example that if you have no particular knowledge or training it would not be best practice to try and re-wire your house or to install a new central heating system by your own hand.  It would be nice to think that we could all do that and save ourselves the misery and heartache of trying to pin down the contracting community and hold them to a sensible price but sad to say we’re not afforded that opportunity.  Every so often, however, such an opportunity for self-help does come along and I’m going to suggest here now that selling property is a case in point.  Which brings me to my question.  Why don’t more vendors just do the job themselves and negotiate best price for their properties?  It’s a perfectly valid question to be asking certainly in late 2025.

Had I asked that question back in 1995 (and I was there) the answer would have been much more obvious. “It’s just not feasible.  We need the estate agents’ marketing tools, the shop window, newspaper advertising and network connections. They have a monopoly over the marketplace and as individuals we simply can’t afford to compete”.  No longer the case of course now that we have digital marketing which essentially wraps all of the above up into one neat and omnipotent bundle.  On the face of it this is something that’s made available only to the estate agency community of course but that is only on the face of it and the opportunity to legitimately gatecrash the party is most definitely there should anyone choose to take advantage.  To my mind that’s definitely missing a trick, for many at least.

Take my word for it when I say that the business of selling a property is not as complicated as one might imagine.  If you are a capable negotiator then you’ll probably do just as good a job or better than the average estate agent.  A strong argument one would think for cutting out any expensive and essentially unnecessary middlemen.

This DIY approach is actually a fairly straightforward exercise should anyone wish to pursue it and be possessed of at least average intelligence as well as the confidence, motivation and application that would be necessary.  The trick, very simply, is to piggyback on the all-important digital marketing (and Rightmove first and foremost) offered by the likes of Purple Bricks and others on their cut-price, but not totally ‘free', modelling.  Whether or not you may choose to utilise their agency role per se or stick to the pure DIY aspect of it as I am concerning myself with here is something of a moot point.  What matters is that for the cost of just a few hundred pounds a buyer can now put himself or herself into exactly the same position as a high street, commissioned estate agent.  There are no secret squirrels today.  As I have already alluded to every agent today is an ‘online agent’ and to all intents and purposes the shops remain open now essentially only as vendor magnets.  You may have noticed that during the COVID lockdown agency business carried on pretty much as normal even though the doors were shut.  One can understand the tactic though as it does seem to still be working given that the selling public en masse, and somewhat misguidedly in my view, continue to be committed to following this anachronistic, and somewhat expensive, route to sale.

Should anyone request it I’d be happy to set out, for a small fee, more detail as to how this self-help approach might work, or how I would go about it anyway.  Napoleon was again only partly right here because you will most likely be looking for some help and assistance in the exercise.  I’m quite sure that if you are the sort of person who could deal with this approach in the first place you would be more than capable of finding this all out for yourself but hopefully some guidance from me and my experience of people that I have worked well with over the years might help to smooth the way.  Photographers, floor-planners, accompanied viewings chaperones, solicitors and conveyancers, that sort of thing.  Some suggestions on composing sales particulars could also be thrown in; something which many agents, it would be fair to say, do not exactly excel at.  

I should perhaps emphasise that I do not receive any kickbacks here and for me this is more about the scratching of the itch and the goodwill than making money. I shall leave that to my professional work and pension arrangements. That said, and notwithstanding the anticipated scepticism, I would be disappointed if I did not at least recover my postage costs. In any event I would at least have the consolation of knowing that I was not throwing money away with quite the same careless abandon as the selling market as a whole seems intent on doing.

You have my contact details so should you wish to take this any further just drop me an email or give me a call and I’ll run through exactly what I can provide and my costs for doing so.

I fully accept of course that what I have had to say here may very well have left you unsure or doubtful as to whether or not this self-help approach could work for you or indeed whether it’s a good idea at all and that’s fair enough. You may well feel that you will want your hand held by a fully instructed agent and that you’re prepared to pay the price to get it. This would then leave you with the simple option of staying with your existing agent and there is of course nothing wrong with that either provided that is you are receiving the quality of service that was expected.  If it should be otherwise, however, and those hopes and expectations are not exactly being met or catered for the thought of switching may well enter your head.  It’s a common enough phenomenon.  My advice in that regard, and for what it’s worth, would be to avoid the more usual sideways move and to consider the smart one instead.

For my own advantage at the time I spent several years trying unsuccessfully to convince sellers that some of the best agents out there today are going virtually unnoticed simply because they are small, independents just like I was lacking that brand profile.  Now I’m on the outside looking in but the truth remains however slow the selling public may be in coming to accept it.  Many, and probably most, of these outfits will be out there working for themselves having gained all of their experience sitting behind the desks of those usual, big-name suspects.  Absent of that, in my view over-valued, brand advantage, however, you may imagine that they have to work that much harder to get their clients in the first place.  By the same token then you might similarly imagine that when they do get their hands on one they work equally hard for them.  Their online adverts will attract exactly the same interest as any of their erstwhile employers I assure you but you as a client could rely on the fact that the person on the end of the phone would be a very personal and dedicated practitioner committed to your best interests.  And the icing on the cake is that you wouldn’t have to finance any shops, cars or various other of those expensive, vendor magnets I mentioned above.  Sitting rooms today are veritable hives of industry.  It is now and has been for virtually my entire career my own place of business and I have yet to receive any substantive complaint about the quality of service provided.  Just let me know and I will happily refer someone suitable for no charge.