The estate agent flashed a sarcastic smile and said it wasn’t so much that the market was in a bad place, rather that my property got so much ‘negative feedback’.
I stared back at her, fuming. I had popped into the offices of this agency to ask for my key back, which I forgot to do last year when I gave up on them being able to sell my house.
This summer, I’ve given it to a friend at a smaller agency, hoping he does a better job than the city slickers at this well-known outfit where they all shout ‘Rah-de-blah-de-rah-de-blah!’ no matter what I say to them.
Miss Smarty Suit, the lead agent, was on the phone when I went in, and a tall chap with floppy hair strode confidently towards me and greeted me with such swagger that he almost pushed me backwards out the door again.
The window display he backed me into was replete with glossy adverts for footballers’ homes, which is to say mock Georgian red brick piles with white pillars and swimming pools and asking prices of many tens of millions of pounds. I wondered why I ever settled on this as my agent, as the floppy-haired oaf bore down on me, baying his pugnacious greeting.
When I asked for my key back, he shouted ‘Rah-de-blah!’ and went to get it. Smarty Suit looked up from her desk and gave me the ‘I’m very busy with someone more important than you’ grimace.
She then rather ludicrously hurried this person off the phone, lurched from her desk and strode at terrifying speed across the room to greet me, backing me into the window display again. This time, the amount of swagger left me inches from dismantling the shop front by crashing into the swinging Perspex display adverts.
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