We needed support, and an estate agent who understood ethics. Martin & Co offered both. We bought our home through Town & Country (Westbury branch) to our great regret. As first time buyers whom they knew not to be DIYers, we'd bought a property from a landlord whose properties they regularly managed, only to find that £14,000 worth of essential repairs were to be needed in the first 4 yrs of ownership. This nearly broke us financially, and when we were both facing unemployment, we quickly realised we needed to sell. The house was also in no fit state to let out - not without further investment to be sure it met with health and safety standards (missing banister batons, exposed utility meters etc.). We'd tried a different estate agency for valuation first, but they wanted us to avoid being frank and honest with buyers, became very pushy over trying to secure themselves as our sale representatives, and we wondered then if there was even such a thing as a 'good estate agent' after that. Then Luke Hames came to visit us from Martin & Co, and one of the first things he talked about, was *ethics*. FINALLY, we'd found someone who talked our language. Luke recognised the great potential of our property, but appreciated the necessity for honesty: we didn't want to do to our buyer what had been done to us by the previous owner. We secured a buyer, much to our surprise, in the first week of viewings. We credit this in part to Martin & Co's strategic arrangement of viewings (which by the way, really help anyone who might e.g. struggle to get time off to be at home for each one). We also attribute it to the fact that Martin & Co did not try to 'run the show' or dictate to us that we withhold information from buyers or be 'flexible' with the truth. They offered advice of course, but they were flexible. Both Luke and Marek worked hard to facilitate our honesty. They allowed me to conduct the viewings with complete candidness, and agreed also to provide to any interested buyer, a [9 page?!] document I wrote, detailing all the woes we'd had with the property, the fixes and work we'd contributed to, and what ultimately still needed doing. Our honestly allowed Martin & Co to renegotiate the offered price (which was the lowest possible value of the house by their estimates) up by £3000. Later, when the buyer tried to demand a price reduction based on a boiler problem right after a completion date had been offered, they had little ground to stand on for having known about this 5 weeks earlier. Instead they received the price reduction they wanted, but our solicitors negotiated exchange that day and an earlier completion date (no more price drops). The only downside was that several staff, including Kate who was handling the progression of our sale, went on holiday around this time. This led to an extremely stressful week/weekend over which these demands and the final agreements for sale were made. In Kate's absence, other staff were unfamiliar with our former honesty, and began chasing us on behalf of the buyer without having checked the case history first. So they were speaking to us as if the boiler issue was a brand new thing, or one that only came to light due to the survey or solicitor's recent paperwork, when actually it had been covered over a month earlier. Kate/Sally had received an enquiry right at the start about our boiler, and we'd had our plumber check it out and forwarded his emails to Martin & Co for the buyer. Even if Martin & Co had failed to pass on those emails, copies went to our solicitors with the initial wave of paperwork several weeks earlier. It shouldn't have been a problem raised only on the day a completion date had been offered. Nevertheless, our solicitors sorted it out, and when Kate came back, everything was resolved. Kate then did us an extra favour of arranging for Marek to take our final meter readings because our utilities company was demanding that readings from our moving out date weren't good enough. We'd moved more than 3 hrs away by this point, so we were incredibly grateful that Marek was able to enter the property and Kate forwarded us those readings the same day, on our day of completion (problem solved!). All in all, I want to stress that Martin & Co handled us as individuals, appreciated why we wanted to be honest, appreciated *our* ethics, and did their best to facilitate this. They gave good and fair advice. Thanks to their willingness to facilitate our openness about the property, we secured a better price than I think we would have had (heaven knows how much it could have dropped after the survey otherwise), and ultimately they thus secured a better return for themselves (1%+VAT at 20%). From a personal perspective, I am incredibly happy that Martin & Co helped me prove a point: that honesty is worth something, and can be profitable. We could have lied about the state of our home, and hoped not all problems would have been spotted by the surveyor or buyer's representative when they visited. We could have omitted information, and perhaps even got away with it, but laws are tightening for sales all the time (as they should!), and at the end of the day I honestly don't think we'd have secured that much better a sale price. Being honest left very little leeway when it came to price renegotiation, so our solicitors were able to negotiate appropriately on our behalf. This would not have happened were it not for Martin & Co initially being willing to conduct viewings and advertise the sale of our home with transparency. They were willing to take a chance on honesty, and ultimately, I think it did us all a favour. Even the solicitors charged less than we expected because there was less work for them to do than if we'd omitted information! Hopefully also, this will have been good for all parties involved. The buyer is one with a substantial amount of cash, but also the skills and connections to do a lot of work on our home that needs doing themselves. They benefited from a breakdown of tasks that they can now use (together with the survey they paid for), to plan the work ahead. They stand to gain up to £30,000, we estimate, when they themselves eventually sell the property on, after doing it up. The costs involved to them, we think may be less than half that. and if house prices rise in the meantime, they will get an even greater reward for their invested time and effort. So, we haven't burdened a buyer unable to do the work with a property that desperately needs a lot of care, we were rewarded for our honesty and stand to recover from our loss of income with an investment in training whilst renting with the house sale proceeds, the solicitors had an easier job and a clear conscience, and Martin & Co got a fairly quick sale, and a decent commission.