Nine people can look after a certain number of sales properly. Past that, the service becomes a call centre with better stationery, and the seller is the one who pays for it.

The arithmetic

A sale in prime central London takes somewhere between fifteen and forty hours of actual attention: the preparation, the viewings, the chasing, the two or three moments where the whole thing nearly collapses and someone has to sit on the phone until it does not.

Multiply that by a register of eighty properties and the hours stop existing. What happens next is predictable. Viewings get handed to whoever is free. Calls get returned the following day. The chase that would have saved a chain does not happen, because nobody was watching closely enough to see it coming.

What we decline

We turn down three kinds of instruction, and it is worth being honest about which is which.

The first is a price we cannot defend. If a seller wants a number the evidence does not support, taking the instruction helps nobody. The property sits, the days on market accumulate, and the eventual sale happens below where it would have landed had it been priced properly in the first week. We would rather lose the instruction than spend four months proving a point.

The second is a property outside what we genuinely know. Our evidence is concentrated in a handful of postcodes. Somewhere we do not know well, we are guessing with a nicer letterhead, and a local firm will do better.

The third is capacity. If taking something on means another seller gets less than they were promised, it is not a decision about the new instruction at all.

What that buys the seller

Fewer instructions mean the person who valued the house is the person who runs the viewings and the person who calls when something moves. There is no handover, and no explaining your own sale back to the firm selling it.

It also means our comparable evidence stays real. An agent carrying a long register of unsold, overpriced stock loses the ability to tell a seller the truth, because half their own listings contradict it.

A question worth asking any agent

Ask how many properties the firm is currently handling and how many people handle them. Then ask who, by name, will run your viewings. The answers take a minute and tell you more than any pitch about marketing reach.