It's A Family Affair

From gentlemen farmers to purveyors of Nazi wine, Roderick Easdale traces the birth of British estate agents.

ONCE upon a time, there were no estate agents. As there were also no mobile phones, goodness knows what the high streets had to fill them—butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, presumably.

Or, at least, there were no estate agents as we now know them, in the sense of firms whose principal business is the selling of houses and flats. Even the professional middle class tended to rent, rather than own, their homes. Those who did possess houses had quite likely inherited them.

For the earliest estate agents, selling houses was an offshoot from their core business, which was often surveying and auctioneering. Herbert Jackson-Stops (b.1884) held weekly livestock auctions in Towester, Northamptonshire. Alfred Savill (b.1829) was a surveyor and auctioneer and Knight Frank & Rutley (est.1896), as it then was, a valuations, surveying and auctions business.

Britain’s population trebled during the 19th century, bringing with it a huge expansion in housing and the burgeoning building societies offered more people a route to home ownership. Many of our best-known estate agencies were formed in this period.

Even so, only about a fifth of homes were owner-occupied by the outbreak of the First World War. Renting from the landed class was still the norm.