Founded 2009 · Compton Terrace
A small firm, deliberately.
Marchmont has never had more than three people in it. That is not modesty about ambition, it is the mechanism: the person who values your house is the person who sells it, start to finish.
Iris Kelleher started the firm in a rented room above what is now a bakery on Upper Street, after eleven years at a national agency where she was expected to value forty houses a week and had met the owners of perhaps four of them.
The first year produced nine sales. The ninth was a house on Canonbury Square that three other agents had failed to shift at a price they had each talked the owner into. It sold in five weeks at ninety thousand pounds below the original guide, which is to say at what it was worth, and the owner has since sent us six clients.
Tomás joined in 2014 and Nadia in 2019. We have turned down the chance to open a second office twice. The register of buyers we keep now runs to four hundred names, which is the only reason two thirds of what we sell never needs to be advertised at all.
Four refusals
It is easier to describe a firm by what it will not do.
01
We do not quote a price to win the instruction.
The number we give you is the number we believe. Agents who buy instructions with an inflated valuation reduce the price nine weeks later, by which time the house looks tired on every portal.
02
We do not put your house on every portal at once.
Two thirds of what we sell never reaches one. A house that appears everywhere on day one has no second act, and the buyers who matter have usually already been told about it.
03
We do not run open houses.
Thirty strangers in a hallway is a marketing tactic. It creates the appearance of demand rather than demand, and it stops anyone asking the questions that actually decide a sale.
04
We do not take on more than fifty a year.
Three of us, forty to fifty houses. Beyond that the person who valued your house stops being the person who sells it, and that is the point at which most agencies quietly become something else.
The three of us
You will meet the person who valued your house on the day it exchanges.
Iris Kelleher
Founding partner · Valuations
Fifteen years in N1. Every valuation in the firm still goes past her.
Tomás Beier
Head of sales · N1, N5
Runs the register. Knows which nine hundred people want what.
Nadia Ferreira
Acquisition · Buying clients
Acts only for buyers. Reads surveys for a living and enjoys it.
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