Page 23 - The Negotiator Mag 52pp

Teresa Finding a home that’s walking distance from their desired school is a must for many people moving here.
Paul This area probably has the highest density of excellent private and government- funded schools than any other patch of London.
Have you been swamped by the foreign buyers that are talked about so much in London?
Paul No, our client base is primarily English - followed by Europeans and then it used to be followed by the Americans, but now the Chinese have now replaced them.
Teresa The Chinese used to only buy brand new but now they’ll consider buying older homes and do them up. A younger generation of Chinese are arriving with different tastes. They can be funny too – often they won’t
buy a property with the number four in its address, and one with eight in it will be jumped on.
Would you ever consider ‘going hybrid’ like other agencies?
Simon What’s hybrid? I think we’re all hybrid agents these days We all use technology and
the internet to do our jobs.
But we were one of the first agents
to sell properties using online listings via FindaProperty and, during the late 1990s (before Rightmove), we sold a property to
a Canadian who had looked at it first online and then flew over to snap it up.
Our industry uses technology all the time and if you don’t, you’re lost really. I think the biggest transformation has been in property management – when we set out it was all done on paper, now we use Fixflo.
We’ve tried a few of the ‘new wonder’ tech platforms and too many of them are trying to take the human out of the estate agency game. So, although they’re trying to agencies save money, the front end has to be human – it’s the strength of our industry.
And it’s our strength too; while the big corporates around here have high staff turnover, we’re still here thirty years later. The grey hairs can be very useful because it shows we’ve got longevity here.
How did you survive the pandemic?
Simon We were very aggressive. We were fully closed for about four days until we realised there were 15 sales transactions going through
from under offer, so we concentrated on spending the next three months getting those through. Finlay Brewer only lost one of them, which helped the cashflow situation.
It was the same for lettings; we had a lot
of agreed tenancies that needed progressing. The numbers slowed down dramatically,
but we managed to keep the team going, with just a few furloughed for around six weeks. We’re still pretty much altogether bar one person who retired early due to the pandemic- we’re 12 people on the books at the moment.
We have one employee who is 86 – she comes in once a week to do some work for us.
Where is the property industry going in London?
Simon The biggest shift is the growing number of ‘independent’ or self-employed agents who now work under the various umbrella brand names.
It’s a US-style of agency that’s growing fast but it means competition is really ramping up, because you don’t need a branch to become an established operator any more. But we’re lucky because we have a strong brand, track record and ethos to give us the edge in this kind of evolving market.
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AUGUST2022 23 29/07/2022
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INTERVIEW