Buy yourself a pay as you go mobile when dealing with some agents.

It depends of course which estate agent you’re talking about but the US style hard sell is here to stay and it takes various forms and involves differing levels of commitment from those paid to do the selling.

As an agent myself it pays little dividend to denigrate others in the industry and it is interesting to look at the way some agents keep people, and money, coming back to their businesses over and over again. There is a well known agency in London who have shrewdly built market share over the last 20 years with a sales pitch and modus operandi that has left the established agents envious and angry in equal measure. But they have a drawback; once they have your telephone number they have you for life, and not necessarily in a helpful way. This kind of agent uses a large call centre to hustle hundreds of people on their database every day to ask whether they want to buy, sell, rent, let or any other discipline you care to mention. Laudable, the commercially minded might say, but a pain in the a**e if you happen to have handed your lifetime mobile number to them. For many one experience is enough to shy away for ever, but it’s not that easy and it’s why I strongly suggest that if you ever deal with such an agent you invest in a one time only pay as you go mobile to use purely for communication with them and avoid giving any other details at all. When you've finished the transaction, bin it.  If you’re the kind of person that ticks the no marketing material please box you might just avoid this most pervasive and invasive of all “junk mail”.