Well that was unexpected.

Estate agents, solicitors, surveyors and everyone else in the house-moving industry only found out about restrictions being lifted last night, the same as you.

We’re covering the phones and emails as usual today and will publish details this afternoon of how we’re going to be doing things to ensure safety for all.

The CC&C office is now closed to visitors, but we’re still working from home. We can open the office for essential visits like key collections, we just need a little notice to get there. We have gloves and things to make any handovers safe in accordance with government advice.

Here’s the detailed lowdown:

The highlights are:

No physical viewings, obviously, but we’re working on providing walk-through video tours of as many properties as we can safely do.

No physical valuations, but we can give pretty accurate advice remotely via Facetime or WhatsApp or similar.

The office numbers and emails are all being covered all day by staff working from home.

Existing sales can progress as normal and current (26/3/20) government advice is that completions and removals can go ahead with proper precautions.

Let properties will be managed as normal. Current advice is that contractors should only visit for essential repairs, not general maintenance.

Do get in touch if you have any questions.

But we can keep it almost business as usual, with some precautions.

We’re following the Government guidelines to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 by temperature checking each morning, washing our hands at every single opportunity and cleaning our work areas frequently.

For those clients who are still looking to arrange valuations or to place their property on the market we are still carrying out these appointments and will do so for as long it is safe to do so and clients would like us to.

We are currently able to provide a normal service to tenants and landlords and expect that to continue.

Estate agents, just like real people, have a habit of winding down a bit in December. Why not? We’ve worked hard all year and it’s always a quiet month anyway so why stress about it? Enjoy the quieter times. Go home a bit early every now and then. Heck, why not take a cheeky Christmas shopping day?

But we were a bit worried about December 2019. When we all sat down and looked at the prospect of a general election and all the surrounding political noise we feared the month might end up horribly quiet, so we decided to bite the bullet and redouble our efforts. If the market was going to be quiet, we’d better make sure the few people out there who were looking to buy viewed and bought our clients’ properties. And if other agents were resting a bit, we might be able to sneak a half-decent month.

It worked out rather well.

According to Rightmove’s data, the same 3 Cambridge offices usually jostle out 1^st to 3^rd position in terms of most sales agreed in the area and it’s usually pretty close, but for December it was definitive who worked the hardest. We managed to find buyers for 28 of our clients’ properties, followed by 19 for the second place office and distantly trailed by the rest, all at 10 or fewer.

We’re chuffed with that.

Looking at the data in detail, it backed up our suspicion that the month would be quietish overall – a total of 239 sales were agreed in December, against 398 in November, a drop of 40% – but our sales level barely slipped at all.

We like to think we work harder and get better results than other firms do. It’s nice when the stats back it up so definitively.