by Craig Taylor
CT: So which hospital is that? Which one did you just mention?
PETER: The Edward VII.
CT: The Edward VII and the Royal Dubai, the Dubai Royal Family.
PETER: The Dubai Royal Family. They got properties all over the country and we do one out at Newmarket which is a stud farm because they love their horses. You feel all right? It’ll start creeping up on you now.
CT: That’s all right.
PETER: Well listen, I’ll tell you what to do. It’ll take us about half-hour, why don’t you close your eyes for about half-hour and I’ll wake you up when we get there? Little ten minutes, quarter of an hour will do you the world of good.
CLIMBING THE LADDER
ASHLEY THOMAS
Estate agent
He strides across Upper Street in Islington to greet me, well groomed in a T.M. Lewin suit. Inside his agency, the waiting room is dominated by a few curved, space-age chairs. There is a drinks refrigerator behind reception. The receptionist sits in front of flat screens showing houses that slowly disintegrate into pixels, replaced by more houses. A young couple sits with an estate agent nearby providing details of their life together. The young man slowly peels the neck label of his beer and his partner lists their dreams, plans and expectations while a double-decker 38 bus moves slowly past the large glass windows.
My trade is full of dishonest people, I’m afraid. We are hated just as much as traffic wardens. It’s known. In the hate tables we are right down there. Sometimes we advise people that an area is changing, and they won’t believe you because estate agents aren’t to be believed. A friend of mine that used to work for the same company as me used to have a big pink cushion in the back of his car, with sequins on it that said: TRUST ME, I’M AN ESTATE AGENT. It was just for comic effect.
In my industry generally people are not mature – they’re usually in their early twenties, a little bit spotty and they don’t really know what they’re doing. I do know what I’m doing, and I think people buy into that confidence. Sales is all about confidence. If they don’t have confidence in you they won’t have confidence in your product. You need to look smart. You need to have a bit of energy. You need to have fantastic communication skills; I’m daily speaking to bankers, lawyers, magistrates, musicians, artists and you need to be able to converse with all of them. I think frankness and honesty are two really important traits to have.
So people come to the office and they wait for me to arrive and they’re expecting somebody in their twenties, who doesn’t know anything about property, who’s going to lie to them, who’s going to not show up for viewings, who’s going to get the wrong keys. And then I walk in.
The London market’s really really strong; zones 1 and 2 of the central area, we’ve got loads of people flocking to London. One out of three buyers is a cash buyer, which is immense when you think of the amount of transactions in the London market. One out of four buyers is foreign. We’re getting buyers from Asia, Australasia, North America, Europe and they’re flocking here to buy London property. It might be for themselves, it might be for their siblings; the demand is incredibly high for London property.
Everybody wants to be in London. It is perceived as being a great city in the world and everybody wants a part of it, so there’s always going to be heaps of demand. That’s why property prices double every six years. We haven’t got limitless land in central London. The only land you can build on is brownfield, which is old industrial. That’s it. Or knock another house down. Everything’s going up now because we’ve run out of land.
I think in England, the importance of property is ingrained into you. ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle,’ you know. You need to get on the ladder as quick as possible. Basically, you need to be on the ladder in order to engage with the ladder. Property prices are always going up and if you’re not on the ladder with that asset climbing in value, the more time you’re away off it, the more difficult it is to get on. Typically you’ll need a deposit of between 10 and 20 per cent to get on the ladder, so when you buy a property for £300,000 you need between £30,000 and £60,000 just as a deposit to get on it. Now that’s a lot of money to save up, it’s a lot of money. If you haven’t got parents who are going to give it to you or you haven’t inherited the money, you know … let’s say property prices go up by a third, by 33 per cent in two years. If you haven’t got on the ladder in two years, then that property now is going to be £400,000 so then you’ve got to get between £40,000 and £80,000 to get on there. So that’s why it’s vitally important to get on the ladder with whatever property it is as quick as possible because then your equity is going up in the property as the property market starts appreciating. As time goes by, your salary will go up, your equity is going up in your property. So then it’s time to sell and then move to the next size property. Because generally you should always want a bigger property because you’re single to start with, then you get into a couple, then you have children, so you always need a bigger property. But what a lot of Londoners have been doing in the last ten years is they have their one-bed property and then they think, hold on a minute, I need a new pension vehicle, so they keep their first property, rent it out, release the money from it and buy their second property. And that’s how you get portfolios of like three, four, five or, like me, ten properties.
When I bought my first property, I rolled on the carpet. It was in Bromley, in zone 5, and for the first six months I had bailiffs knocking on my door every other week because I was defaulting on bills. But I knew I had a property. I said to myself, this is my carpet. Well, actually it wasn’t mine, it was the bank’s carpet. I didn’t own any of it really. But I always do that – you know, touch the walls, roll around, say out loud: it’s mine. Even with the new ones that I buy now, I get very excited because it’s a chunk of London that’s mine.
It’s never too late to get on the ladder. We try and make them realize that if they use their brain and use the right connections with regard to finance then they actually can afford something. Whatever they can afford we’ll show them their best option and try and convince them to buy it. We are salesmen at the end of the day and we do earn a fee from selling something, but we are right in saying you must get on the ladder or it just flies away. I think the average age four years ago of first-time buyers was 31. That’s probably increased now. And so generally people can only get on the ladder if their parents are going to give them a wad of money and not everybody has rich parents who can give them £30,000 or £50,000, so you know there are people in our offices on decent salaries trying to save a deposit, they’re in their late twenties and would love to get on the ladder. And the first property they’ll buy will be in an ex-council block and people hate the thought of having to live in a council block when they’re used to renting a nice apartment. But you’ve got to get on, you know? That council block will be full of professionals because everybody’s doing the same thing, so there’ll be half council tenants and some of them may be rough, some may be very nice, but the other half will be young professionals just trying to get a foot on the ladder.
I see it all the time because I’m always dealing with clients that have to move. They’re a couple in a two-bed flat, just about to have a baby, so they have to get somewhere with a bit of outside space or a third bedroom. They have a budget that’s higher than what they’re selling at, and you usually organize the finance for it so the step is there all the time. You’re always seeing the ladder. It’s like steps, really, going up into this very big house in a great big cloud. Never ending.
And then you see it on the downside when the economy’s not good, you see people losing their jobs and forced sales and downsizing. We’re seeing a lot of downsizing right now, but there’s always somebody who’s on the up who will buy that house. Something will always sell in London because there are so many weird, quirky, unusual people. For instance, most people want an old property either to do up or to move straight into and a lot of people don’t like new-builds. But the Chi
nese and Japanese, they love new-builds, they won’t even touch an old property. So there’s a market for everything, you know. That dark and dingy basement that nobody wants to buy – well, some people love dark and dingy basements. I’ve just been out with a guy that wants a big basement. Great, I’ve got some for you because nobody else wants them. Yeah, you’ll always sell.
We’ve sold houses in the past where there’s been murders. There was one house where a whole family was murdered. I think it was a mother and three children, and we were selling the house. You don’t mention things like that. If they want to do their research, then of course they can do their research. It’s not lying to them. It’s just not presenting them with all the facts. If they ask a question we will answer it, frankly and honestly. But if they haven’t asked … At the end of the day we work for our client and they want to sell a house, so you’re not going to tell everybody there was an awful murder in the house. It’s not going to sell it, is it?
On a single day I go out on six hours of viewings and I may be showing stock at £400,000 one-beds to a £3 million house, and it’s lovely dealing with that variety of people. The variety of perceptions that they bring to us range from ultra-negative to ultra-positive. You watch body language, you watch whether they smile or not. If they’re smiling in a property you know that something’s igniting their p-spot, as I call it. Their property spot, instead of a g-spot. Some of your buyers, you can get on with them so well that when it comes to the business part of things, the offering, it can be a bit awkward because you really like them but you’ve got to squeeze another £50,000 out of them, so you have to switch from ‘I really like you, you’re lovely,’ to ‘This is business.’ There’s no point being there if you’re just going to not sell.
I’m the second-best performer in the whole of Foxtons. The only person that beats me is someone in Notting Hill and we cannot compete with their ticket price in Notting Hill. For the biggest company. It’s good to know you’re in that top position. But the overriding emotion for me is somebody comes to me, they’re looking for a home and I find them a home. It’s a very exciting moment when they see that home, then it’s the hard work of getting it to be legally theirs. That’s very difficult in this country. It’s not easy at all. But when you hand over the keys, it’s a very special moment because you know that they’re going to go to their property – they probably won’t roll around on the carpet like I do – but they’ll do something that will be symbolic and, you know, sometimes when you give them the keys tears come to your eyes because you know what it means to them. They’re finally in that beautiful property, whether it’s small or big, whether it’s ugly or needs doing up or is absolutely sensational inside, it really is a great feeling.
ROBERT GUERINI
Property owner
Margaret Thatcher came in as prime minister in 1979, and she realized soon after that to get the votes and to be politically in the ascendancy she could offer council tenants the opportunity to buy their houses or flats. This was a social disaster – why? In the city centre, we need people to maintain the city, guys to do the gas, the electricity, the water and so on, and people to run the transport system. We can’t have these people come miles. What’s happened now, the council flats in the city were all sold to the incumbent for a very low figure because they were sitting tenants or they’d been there for so many years. So a guy and his family, he’s a man of 60, he’s able to buy his flat for £20,000 and he’s able to sell it within a year, I think they had to wait a year, they could sell it for £180,000. Of course he sold it, packed up his stuff down to Bournemouth where he bought a lovely flat overlooking the sea. Well you can’t blame him. But, having said that, the person that got that flat then was often a buy-to-letter who rented it on to somebody else, but not at £50 a week. It was £100 a week. Now slowly but surely cheap accommodation for working people in the city contracted. It was a real tragedy in my opinion.
In the front room of his house, just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, there are photos of his family on the walls and drawings by his grandchildren on the door. He wears a light yellow shirt and tinted glasses and speaks in a slight Irish lilt.
*
I’ve got people from every part of the world in the flats I own. I’ve got Mexicans, Somalis, Spaniards, Germans, Algerians, Lebanese. I’ve just taken a man from … where is he from? A Kosovan. The first Kosovan I’ve hired a place to. I hired to him last week. When I think about it now, I just think: are there any English people? In the suburbs you tend to get English people. I’ve got flats down in Sidcup, I’ve got English people there.
I’ve never had to sell cheaper than I bought. Ever. Even now, because so many people come into London. The minute there’s unemployment over the country, there’s always work in London. Why? Because of the need to service those million people a week that are visitors. They come in and they need service. They need to be fed and watered and housed and so on. So that’s a huge crowd of people who need that service and therefore when people are out of work they come into the city and get a job as a barman. You go into any restaurant in the city, it’s all young foreign people. I went to a restaurant, a very smart restaurant yesterday for my wife’s anniversary, we went to a restaurant down near Mayfair, and all the servers there, including the manager, were foreign. There were no English people. Quite incredible.
I like all the ethnic groups that are here. It makes the city more cultural. Go up the Edgware Road and see the hubble-bubble pipes and stuff like that. I can be in Arabia or I could be in Edgware Road. I can be in St Lucia by going to Brixton Market. I enjoy that. I go to Brixton Market a lot. I’ve got flats there and I go down there and buy some fish. Go into the fish shop in Brixton and you will get ten black women telling you how to cook a bit of fish. ‘No man, you don’t wanna do that …’
I’ve never been able to understand race or prejudice, really. I find it very difficult. It’s like going to a library and saying to the librarian, I’m sorry, I only read books with red covers.
The other night I went to a dinner with a young man who had just come down from university and was living in London with a young woman. They both were decrying the fact that it was very difficult to make a living, very difficult to find accommodation, very difficult to buy and to live, and so on. And I said, there is a resolution to your problem. They said, what’s that? Well, you could get a job that wasn’t too taxing during the day, and every evening get a job serving tables in a restaurant where the tips are good. Don’t go into a classier restaurant because it’ll all be on the bill, 12½ per cent and you won’t get cash. Go to a little cafe that does good business, near a railway station or something, be there on time, be immaculate, be glamorous, you, young man, dress yourself up. The guvnor will only pay £5 an hour for six hours, which would be £30, but you’ll get £20 in tips. You’ll pick up £50 a night, five days a week, that’s £250 in addition to your salary. I said, the two of you making another £250 a week. That’s £500 a week, that’s maybe £15,000 a year with which you’ll be able to buy a place. And you know what they said? We wouldn’t be prepared to do that because we wouldn’t have a social life. I said, but you’ve got no money. You’ve got no social life! But they couldn’t see it. They weren’t willing to put that sort of effort in.
If you’re not willing to put in the effort in this city, don’t come here. This city is about effort. Effort is rewarded, no question. I know some fine young people here work night and day and they collect that bread; all right, so they spend a year all over the world with it, but at least they’ve achieved that. They were capable of working sixteen, eighteen hours a day. They were capable of saving £10,000 a year. They were capable of doing it. But I don’t find any problem with that. Social life, hang around pubs drinking beer? Forget it. As my father says, it takes not the wits of a donkey to drink five pints of Guinness and fall down. Right?
STEPHANIE WALSH
Property seeker
I grew up outside of Cambridge and was desperat
e to get away from home. Not because I didn’t like it. I was just excited by London and thought it would be a good adventure. Being 18, I was kind of naive, like, ‘Oh yeah, it could be amazing and easy and brilliant!’
I came for art school, and at first I was really awed by London. Once, we were given a sculpture project to make a self-portrait. I made a life-size sculpture, a weird abstract thing with a frame out of bamboo sticks and tissue paper, and thought that I could take it on a London bus. It was enormous. I had no idea that London was so busy, that people weren’t interested in things like that and that they wouldn’t make space for you. If I’d done that on our school bus in the village everyone would have been like, ‘Oh wow, you can have a whole seat to yourself.’ In London, everyone’s just like, ‘Stupid art student.’
I lived in Brixton for about two years after college and then a really good friend had a flat in Old Street with a room going, so I moved up there. We lived in an ex-council flat just behind the fire station in Old Street, and it was really good fun. That was quite a hedonistic time. The job I had, it was demanding but it was also pretty sociable, and suddenly there were a lot of gallery events to go to, and Old Street was convenient for bars. I spent loads of time going out.
The whole flat was grotty, though. It was really cheap, but it had concrete floors and no curtains and was freezing cold in the winter. The friend that I was living with was working at a magazine and I was working at a gallery and our lives weren’t crossing over that much, so we were both using the flat as a bit of a dumping ground. There was a three-seater sofa that had obviously been there for years. All the cushions had flopped in the middle, and none of us wanted to spend any money to sort it out. One weekend her parents were coming to stay and she bought a new throw for the sofa and a plant for the living room and it transformed the whole place. It was like, ‘Why didn’t we do that before, you know?’ We were all so tied up with going out and doing work things that we just weren’t spending any time there. We couldn’t really be bothered.
