Behind the desks
Four people run Cornice & Slate Real Estate between them. Each one takes every service on the list, and each one has two the office sends their way first. The pictures below are interiors rather than portraits of the agents — every photograph in this office's picture library that showed a face was left out of it.
No. 01
Owner and lead agent
Margaret Ellis opened Cornice & Slate Real Estate and still walks the first house on every instruction the office takes, writing the valuations that the listings are then built on. They will say at the first appointment whether a house is going to reach the figure its owner has in mind, and they will say it before the photographs are booked rather than after a quiet month on the market.
Responsible for the figure the other three desks work to.
No. 02
Senior agent
Daniel Reyes takes the buyers moving in from elsewhere and the owners letting a house for the first time, which are the two ends of the list and want the same thing from an agent: somebody who has actually stood in the room. A house reported on for a buyer gets the same written note whether they liked it or not, and a tenancy is never offered before the referencing is back.
Responsible for every written report that leaves this office.
No. 03
Agent and enquiries lead
Priya Nair reads the messages that arrive through the contact form and writes most of the replies, which is why a message describing the house, roughly when it was built and what has been done to it comes back with a service and a price against it. If the service being asked for is the wrong one for that house, the reply says so and names the one that fits.
Responsible for what the office promises before a door is opened.
No. 04
Office coordinator
Samuel Hart keeps the diary, answers the telephone and makes certain that every appointment has the right amount of time behind it, which is the reason one instruction at a time is a fact here rather than a phrase. A house that is going to need half a day of measuring is not written into an hour because an hour is what was free.
Responsible for the timing of the day and for the book itself.
Talk to the office
Naming an agent in a message is enough. If they are not working the day being asked about, the reply says which days they are.
The column
Holiday hours, an agent joining or leaving, a price that moves. Two or three notes a year and nothing else.
It is published in the open, where anyone can copy it, so it is left short of its final polish and audit pass. The design chosen is fully audited and polished before it goes live.