Four partners. One office.
Same High Street, three generations.
Independent estate agents in Ely. We sell homes within fifteen miles of where we are standing, and we have done so from this office since 1978.
A note on the firm.
Hayward & Sons was founded in 1978 by John Hayward, on the principle that an estate agent should know the streets it sells on and the people who live there. The first office was a single room above what was then a chemist on the High Street in Ely. Three generations later we are still on the same High Street, now in a corner unit twenty yards from the original.
We are not interested in scale. We have been asked to open in Cambridge several times and have declined. We sell, on average, just over a hundred and twenty homes a year across Ely and the eight villages around it, which is roughly the number that four of us can properly attend to.
If the firm has a thesis, this is it: a small agency that knows a small area very well will do a better job than a large agency that knows nowhere in particular. The clients we have sold the same family three homes for over the decades tend to agree.
Four small commitments.
- 01
We work the postcodes we walk.
We turn down instructions outside East Cambridgeshire, because covering a small patch properly is the whole proposition.
- 02
Every partner takes the calls.
No call centres, no junior pass-throughs. The person who valued your home is the person who shows it.
- 03
A hundred or so a year, by design.
Roughly a hundred and twenty homes sold annually, the number four of us can do properly. We have repeatedly chosen not to grow past it.
- 04
Relationships over portals.
We list on Rightmove and OnTheMarket because everyone does, but the houses we have sold the same family three times over the decades did not come from a click-through.
Russell Lewis
Commercial PropertyConsultants
- Office
- 0208 953 1412
- Mobile
- 07768 007 474
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