Why SmartDecision Properties

Ring a large agency and you are given a consultant. Which one depends on whose turn it was. Several of them will be very good, and from the outside you cannot tell which sort you have got until you are already some way in. Nobody asks you.

We work the other way round. Before you are shown a single property we want to know what you are trying to do and by when. Only then do we choose the person, and we choose someone whose experience and knowledge of your market match what you have told us.

A brokerage can put forward only the people on its own payroll. In every market we work in we also use independent specialists: people we have known and worked alongside for years, rather than names collected off a list.

So if the person best suited to your purchase does not sit in our office, that does not stop us putting you in a room with them. Who is on our payroll is our problem, not yours.

At most agencies the first person you speak to is there to work out whether you are worth passing on. They take your budget and your timeline and put you in a queue.

Ours has spent years in the market you are ringing about. That matters mostly for the questions. What people ask for at the start is often not what suits them, and noticing the difference takes somebody who already knows where these purchases tend to go wrong. So we listen before we suggest anything.

For most agencies the file closes at completion. That is roughly when the questions start. The utilities are in somebody else's name. The tax registration has a deadline nobody mentioned. A tenant wants something, or the building does. In a few years you may want to sell.

We deal with all of that through the local partners we already work with, which means there is a number to ring afterwards and it is the same number as before.

Eight years is long enough to have watched a good many purchases all the way through. Some turned out extremely well. Some were regretted, and a few of those for reasons that were there to be seen at the time by anyone who knew where to look.

What separated them was almost never the building. It was what got asked before the money moved, who was doing the asking, and whether that person had any reason to give you the awkward answer.

Which is why we are careful about who we hand you to. The list is not built by collecting business cards. We look at what someone has actually closed, how they behave when a deal starts going badly, and how they talk about clients who are not in the room.

An introduction from us puts our name beside theirs. That is a useful amount of pressure, and it is what keeps the list short.