Observations on estate agents

I must admit to somewhat of an obsession with estate agents. With their walk-in offices on every high street, their pinstriped suits and fleets of cars, not to mention the flattery of their bright, beaming 24/7 interest in you, having a consultation with an estate agent is almost akin to the way visiting the local vicar might have been, before the Church of England became a minority sport, or what going to see your local GP was like, before his or her workload tripled.

The housing market has supplanted religion as our national faith. According to an opinion poll, a quarter of us are fed up with estate agents, and the Office of Fair Trading has been called upon to deal with them. But for many, estate agents - even though they are devious pranksters stealing other people's For Sale boards and doing sweetheart deals with developers behind each other's besuited backs - are connected to a drip-feed of Prozac.

If you have something you want to sell, great. If you have something you want to buy, even better. Estate agents never seem to need those piteous exhortations for good shop technique that can be sometimes found desperately Sellotaped to the doors of staff loos in high-street pizza joints or record shops. You know, hand-written signs that proclaim: "Remember! The Shop Floor is a Theatre! Get Out There and Perform!"

The average estate agent, with his permanent optimism and his thrilling enthusiasm and his almost total dependence on commission, never needs such prompting. Estate agents are probably the nearest you will ever get to seeing pure capitalism in action. No wonder the Americans call it "real estate". No job is more real than one in which every single sale is crucial for your salary.

I once dealt with an agent who was so keen on taking me to a property that he crashed his car, with me in it, while driving there. "No worries!" he yelled, leaping free of his seat belt in a gazelle-like movement. "Let's leave the car here and go in yours!" How proactive is that? Then there was the one who tried to convince me that a kitchen with no window was quite a contemporary look.

Estate agents can easily be castigated as modern-day snake-oil pedlars, desperately hoping that if they say it often enough, and to enough journalists, then London's downmarket Dalston might indeed be equal to glossy Hampstead, or Liverpool's gloomy Dingle become a natural extension of its elegant neighbour, Aigburth. But I think one can read their function more positively.

Just as the shoe department on the first floor at Liberty can, for a brief spell, make you feel like a witchy, Choo-shod babe who might indeed trot up a red carpet on the arm of (say) George Clooney next week, so can the estate agent make personal nirvana, as expressed through your domestic arrangements, seem not just a possibility but a probability. After a brief consultation, you walk away thinking that you might sell your house for thousands more than you ever dreamed of, or that with a bit of bargaining, that house you have always wanted could be yours.

I once did a survey of the ten things that most annoyed estate agents. Somewhere near the top came things like not providing enough bunches of keys, owning vast numbers of pets with bladder problems, and not describing the property adequately at the outset. We prefer to call our dingy basements "garden flats"; we say there are three bedrooms when in fact there are only two, plus a larder; and we forget, accidentally on purpose, about the carpeted bathroom. (Note: no estate agent, either for rental or sales, will take a property seriously if there is carpet in the bathroom.) They try to help us, but we throw all sorts of problems in their path.

But their biggest cavil is that we are greedy. We want our houses to sell (or rent) for much more than they are worth, and we won't accept the estate agent's advice. And who is it, in the end, that licenses gazumping? I suspect that estate agents are the way they are because their customers are the way they are. In property, as with most things in life, you only get the sales staff you deserve.

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