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| Sam's word |
Door to door salesmen. Big feet in the front door, wearing vulnerable people down over hours in their homes.
Used car salesmen. 'Clocked' cars that show a gentle 20,000 mileage where the true mileage is 100,000 plus. Claims of the superior reliability of the vehicle that barely groaned its way into the premises the day before. Have you ever seen the splendid Ealing comedy School For Scoundrels? You should. One of the high points is the sale of a terrible car by two of the shadiest salesmen you could ever meet, Dudley and Dunstan, resulting in Ian Carmichael losing out to Terry-Thomas with a young lady (temporarily, as it happens).
There are many more examples of people who will do anything, and often bad things, for a sale.
Well, we will join some of those people. The better ones. We will do anything for a sale. If it is within reason and if it is within our values and ethics. You may not hear the word ethics around estate agency too often, so here it is again. Ethics.
So, what is the 'sale' I am talking about? What do I mean by 'anything'?
The sale I am talking about isn't selling ourselves to get people's business, important though that is.
No, the sales I am talking about are the ones that we do on others behalf. So selling a property we've been instructed to sell for the best price and in the best interests of a home owner. Or having a property let for a landlord to the right tenants and not ones who will provide an unpleasant experience for that landlord.
The 'anything' that we will do starts with working hard. My staff and I put ourselves out, big time, to make a sale. We work a lot of hours and take calls round the clock. We take a proper look at a property we're to present. No five minutes in and out and a scrawl on the back of an envelope before someone types up some crude property details sheet and considers the job done. No unaccompanied viewings. No amateur photography, we use professionals.
The market for sales is strong as I write, so you can be lazy and sell properties. We don't like that at all. We're not like that at all. Our approach is the same, is as reliable, whether the market is hot or cold.
As a smaller, but very determined agency, we can't do everything at once. Yet here are some things we have done as part of our journey. We are the result of the bringing together of two agencies to form Edward Ashdale. That meant re-branding and merging IT resources, not a cheap or easy start. Since then, one of our offices, Bromley, has moved (not very far) to a better office where we can welcome people better.
We've developed a new website, and the one we have now will be replaced when we're ready with something even better. We've been blogging interesting writing (we hope) about our industry and our locality, and more. We've taken to the airwaves by appearing on Meridian Radio - thank you, DJ Alan King. We've taken a presence on social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and more unusually for estate agents, Tumblr. Why? Because we need to be heard, and if we're heard, so are the properties we have for sale or let. Certainly we network and leaflet and have good property details in our windows like many other agents. That is where many other estate agents give up, job done. Believe me, far fewer go the extra mile into these social media platforms, or onto You Tube, which we use and we are going to be using more and more from now on as well.
The anything we won't do for a sale is to exaggerate, lie, deceive or pretend that things are one way when they're another. I wrote in an earlier blog post about "the agencies who have a drive to fleece consumers unfairly". They do exist and we will never be one of them. So we work hard, we innovate, and we build our reputation that we are twenty first century estate agents with traditional values who are good to work with.
That way, we get to sleep at night.
Sam Samuel, MNAEA CRLM, January 2015
You can view our earlier posts in our Index here.
