Estate agents vary in their approach. Some would do anything rather than take a prospective buyer; others

KEY MISTAKE: Think carefully before handing your keys to an estate agent

insist that you leave them to show your home to prospective buyers.

The latter type should be told politely never to make contact with you again.

Firstly, it is your home and no sharp-suited estate agent has a right to demand access to it at their whim. You may feel that you just can’t face showing people round. We thought the same so were happy to have an agent who included “free” viewings as part of his service.

In retrospect, that was another mistake. Firstly, showing people your home is not as traumatic as you might think. The people come in, smile a bit, say they like it and leave. They may not give you honest feedback and it can be a bit nerve-wracking at first but it’s nothing to be afraid of.

If you don’t conduct the viewings, you have no contact with the buyer at all. And that means that all communications are dependent on the bond of trust between you and the agent. That’s a recipe for misery.

If you aren’t there, how do you know who was in your home? How do you know if anyone was even there, rather than a phantom viewing by an agent pretending to be doing something. Can you rely on the agent to retain the important details of the best features of your property and location? Can you trust him or her not to rifle through your knicker drawer?

There is another issue with agents who conduct all the viewings: availability. Say someone calls your agent and says: “I’m looking at flats in the area on Thursday night. Can I see the property you have for sale? It’s the only night I can do.” What if the agent is showing properties on the other side of the city at that time?

The chances are you will end up missing out on a prospective buyer, who you were never even told existed.

I did one thing right, which I would urge anyone who is still determined to allow an agent access to their home to follow. I retained my mortice lock. I had made some excuses and promised to get a copy made – “but in the meantime, I’ll leave it on the latch when you are coming round and lock up later”.

There are, of course, security and insurance implications of leaving your house less than fully locked, so you should leave it in this way for an absolute minimum of time. However, if things go wrong, you can easily replace the inner part of the latch for a few pounds, meaning that nobody has full keys for your home.

Ultimately, the agent will try to retain your keys as a lever in any disputes and you will feel very insecure, possibly faced with a large bill for replacing a mortice and latch lock. And, should you be unfortunate enough to be a victim of a break-in, your insurance policy may well be under threat should it transpire that you had left your keys with a third party.

Gary White is welcome to my latch key. I’m sure he knows where to stick it.

There is something similar with estate agents. Our agent – the one that looked a bit like Charles Hanson – seemed like ever-such-a-nice fellow when he visited us. But as I said, we made it easy for him.

When I met him in his office, it was a different story. Now, again, I made a mistake. I had been working hard at getting the flat into a presentable condition and went there exhausted. For fatigue, read weakness. The agent (who by now deserves a name – we’ll call him Gary White), clearly did. To this day, that’s what irks me most.

I made an appointment to go to the office to sign the papers. Immediately, Gary White’s bullish estimate was being tempered with a suggestion that “you’re now probably looking at the lower end of that estimate” and mentioning people who had sold similar properties recently for below the bottom end of his estimate. Then of course, he wanted to price the property accordingly, “to get people in the door”.

Being in Scotland, we had been advised to start with an “offers over” price that simply confuses everyone. But even my mental arithmetic told me that the expected 20-per-cent-over-the-asking-price couldn’t hope to reach the agent’s valuation of the property, never mind reach the top end. This, I was told, was nonsense. The starting price didn’t matter as long as people came to see it.

“But if we go in at that price, we give the buyer an expectation that they can get it at a lower price than we want.”

“It doesn’t work that way. We get them in the door and tell them what we want.”

Later, I was to be proved right and he was to be proved a liar, which was really very little consolation. Like a fool, I agreed and signed the contract, which he took from me before immediately revealing that he would be on holiday for the next week, soon blustering, “But I’ll be in the UK – you can still contact me”. First week of marketing wasted.

Now, had I not been tired and at a low ebb, I would have leaned over the table, grabbed the contract and torn it up there and then. But I didn’t. If ever you are in that situation, I recommend you be prepared for such dirty tricks and do just that. To hell with protocol, just take the paper and tear it up in front of the agent’s face and dare him or her to do something about it. But most of all, be prepared to be shafted.

I left Gary White’s office deeply regretting not having had those alternative estimates, feeling shafted, and knowing I couldn’t trust my estate agent, with whom I had just embarked on a crucial commercial relationship.

Later, I found out precisely what part of “the UK” he had been in. It’s a nice place.

You know what they say – get three quotes. Even Sarah Beeney does it.

Sarah Beeney: Has three estate agents at a time

And that’s all very well and good. But I didn’t.

Why? Well, properties were selling like the proverbial hot cakes in our street up until Christmas and one estate agent was selling more than 75% of them. We had watched the prices flats were realising and they were all within pretty easily-identifiable brackets. There was a clear rule of thumb depending on general condition, obviously, but most crucially double-glazing, central heating and secure entry.

Ours has all three and so we expected it to be placed towards the top bracket, which it was, though we were always prepared to compromise on price. So why bother with extra quotes when the guy with the track record of selling in the area, is quoting us the price we know should be attainable and offering the services we want at a price that seems reasonable?

Well, there are two reasons, actually. We’ll come to the second one later but the first is that by not

Charles Hanson: not my former estate agent but he looks a bit like him

taking those precautions, our cocky little estate agent (who seemed like a nice enough fellow and reminded me of Bargain Hunt’s Charles Hanson) immediately heard the sucker bell ring and set about spinning lies, half-truths and other fluff designed to deceive us.

I really believe that, far from being the respectable, decent young guy who wanted to do his best for his customers, the agent was looking for signals that he was dealing with idiots – making it too easy for him to gain our custom was just a flag to him that I was just the kind of fool he was interested in signing up.

When he saw that he wasn’t forced to fight for the business, he concluded that we had no savvy and therefore deserved no respect, honesty or even professionalism.

We also missed out on the chance to evaluate what other agents would tell us about their rivals, most of it subtle back-stabbing, but viewed in that context occasionally valuable, none the less. For example, the agent we engaged would prove unsuitable as well as dishonest, as other agents were all too keen to point out.

There are a few of lessons to be learnt by this sorry tale: always take at least three quotes and grill your prospective agent about what he will do. Never be afraid to make him feel that he is going to have a tough, demanding customer – if he doesn’t want your business then, you are better off without him.

Thomas Plant: Not an estate agent

But also, remember that cheating estate agents are not all classic wide boys. Some of them give a very good impression of being terribly nice to their mothers.

Our next agent, strangely enough, looked a bit like Thomas Plant, pointing to another lesson – always be especially wary of estate agents who resemble antiques experts.

One of the first words people might use to describe me is cynical. You see, I’m the sort of person who is always putting a dampener on things: the kind to sneer at the motives of celebrities in charity events, always the first to decide that something doesn’t add up in someone’s story; the sort of person who believes there are plots and dodgy dealings everywhere but still scoffs at the naivety of conspiracy theorists who think they have them sussed.

For that reason, most of my friends expect me to be the last person to be taken for a ride (except on a bus, of course).

That is where I am almost invariably misunderstood. While many people seem to think that being a victim of a scam immediately makes you some sort of fool, I disagree. Sure, if you want to give your bank details to unknown Africans to help them launder ill-gotten gains, you deserve what’s coming to you.

But sometimes people are cheated because they choose to let their guard down. When banks lend people money, they aren’t usually doing so in the belief that they will always be paid back, they are (don’t laugh) assessing and calculating risk. They know something can go wrong but they estimate that the odds of a certain prospect defaulting make them either a reasonable risk or a no-brainer.

I often do the same with people. But what I risk is trust. You see, I believe that it is wrong to define your life believing that everyone is out to cheat you. I even believe that people have a right to  a degree of trust, until their actions show them unworthy of it. Doesn’t that leave me vulnerable? Hell, yes. But what is the alternative: let the actions of dishonest people warp me into someone who is incapable of giving trust? It’s a risk that I choose to take, albeit taking as many precautions as I can, in the understanding that I will sometimes be let down.

Some, especially estate agents, would say that makes me a fool. And, certainly, in my experiences with the people of that occupation, my willingness to trust on an open-minded basis has been a mistake.

But I always remind these smiley people of one maxim: when the fools are the people who put their trust in you, they are not the ones with the problem.

Honestly, telling anyone that I was prepared to trust an estate agent exposes me to righteous lampooning. But there you go – I did it, more than once.

So it’s the credit crunch, sub-prime mortgages, the US economy, the price of oil, yadda, yadda, yawn. Strangely, amid all the finger-pointing regarding the economic downturn and housing market slump, the real culprits are being ignored.

You guessed it: estate agents. The same people who profiteered in the good times at the expense of buyers and sellers alike have more than a fair proportion of blame to shoulder. They did more than anyone to over-inflate the market and it is their desperation to now sell – anything at any price – that has contributed hugely to plummeting prices.

Remember when you engage one of these sheisters that, on average, every £1000 you may get for the sale of your property makes a difference of £10-£15 to that odious smiley creature in the expensive suit. Then tell me you trust them to get you the best price possible.