![]() Hersham is one of an older generation of estate agents in London – mostly men – who have been selling the city’s most lavish homes since the 60s. ![]() Without them, you’re writing a book that no one reads, selling a house that nobody sees. An agent, as their name implies, makes things happen. But then you try to do something without them and it falls apart, because there’s no interpreter, no buffer, no oil. Sometimes, it’s not obvious what they actually do. They say the right things, know the right people, take a cut. Through a pretty village, down a narrow lane, the car stopped outside a large, gated redbrick manor. “Reverse the car, reverse the car, reverse the car! Every conversation I have I lose the fucking signal! Just stop the car!” “Hi, how are you? I’m seeing a house in the country, I lost signal.” Pause. “I’ve got no signal, this is a disaster! I’ve got no signal! You need to turn the car around. Then the motorway, fields, lanes, villages. Prime central London, or PCL as it’s known in the real estate industry, had given way to the kind of areas that tend not to cross Hersham’s desk. He knows which would suit one of his buyers: the new-build penthouse for the Indian billionaire a stuccoed hunk of Knightsbridge for the Chinese industrialist. He knows every building of note in the city: their provenance, square footage, basement depths and ceiling heights. “A very strange house.” He knew its owner, its previous owner, its interior design, probably its future. “Well, it was renovated about 10 years ago,” said Hersham. “What’s going on over there, Gary?” asked O’Brien, of a grand edifice near Hyde Park. The journey out of town allowed Hersham and O’Brien to exchange information on properties we were passing. We were going, it emerged, to a country house not far from London. “It doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate hard, but you’ve got to negotiate fairly, that’s my motto.” In other words, he shouts at people a lot, but what he shouts is true. “Life is always to do with kindness,” he told me. ![]() In an industry famed for its lack of scruple, he is a firm believer in probity. He is fastidious, and arranges his stamp collection, which contains every stamp from the Queen’s coronation to the present day, in precise blocks of four. “Was it a good price or not?! Just a simple yes or no!” Next call: “Believe you me, I know it was the best apartment I’ve ever seen.” Next call: “You’ve got us into serious trouble because you left a door open!” He did this instinctively, it seemed, his personality as volatile as the job required, and indivisible from it. ![]() “They’re closer to my age than to his.”Īs he swerved from conversation to conversation, Hersham modulated his tone accordingly: from soothing compliments to bawling out an underling. “It’s probably third-generation wealth that he’s seeing now,” O’Brien told me. He shuttles between representatives of New York financiers, Middle Eastern royal families, the now-almost-quaint Russian oligarchs. “He knows everyone,” a former colleague of his told me. Hersham has the kind of deep, multigenerational well of contacts that means he now sells not just to individuals, but entire dynasties. He is often finding numbers, asking people for numbers, giving out numbers. He talks with the frenetic urgency of someone whose conversations contain the potential for expensive failure. He is usually having at least three conversations at once: two on the phone (there is typically someone on hold) and one in real life. “May I suggest,” he replied, “that you listen to my telephone conversations and see what goes on.” Well, this is what goes on. As we drove, I asked Hersham what skills were required to do his job. ![]()
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