Estate agent Rachel Ollington was just 16 when she left school after finishing her GCSE’s and had every intention of returning to take her A-levels but then found herself with an estate agency summer job and never looked back.

She told The Neg: “I left school when everyone else did after my GCSE’s. I had a summer job in Barrett’s estate ggency (not the housebuilder) – a local estate agents – and I just really enjoyed it and decided not to go back. I was there for three years.”

Ollington was obsessed with buying her first home and now she and her family are living in her third family property – a four-bedroom house worth £475,000 in Wickford, Essex, which they bought for £183,000 in 2005.

TEPILO

By 2015 Ollington had moved on to become head of real estate at online agents Tepilo where she stayed for nearly four years before moving on to Angel Homes and Lettings in Westcliff-on-Sea.

Ollington managed to build up a small buy-to-let portfolio along the way and since February last year she’s been working as a personal estate agent through Vesta Essex, powered by eXp, where she boasts more than 11,000 followers on Instagram.

Customer service is the most important aspect of the job and getting that right will help your figures.”

Offering advice to other young negotiators wanting to make a go of it Ollington says: “You have to have a passion for property and helping people to move.

FIGURES

“Customer service is the most important aspect of the job and getting that right will help your figures. Property is a people business 110%. If you don’t like property don’t be an estate agent!

“If you love property, then my advice would be to stick with it and listen to the people around you. Spending quality time with the people around you at all levels is important – you will learn a lot. Even today I’ve just come back from a training course and was mixing with some people who had one agency, others three, some specialised in lettings – it was a great mix. You can learn a lot from other peoples’ experiences.

CAUTIOUS

“The market has definitely slowed – there are still lots of buyers out there but they are a lot more cautious now. But it’s definitely not the doom and gloom that some in the media would have you believe.

“We’d never seen the market speed before that the low interest rate environment created but that wasn’t sustainable. What we have now is what I’d call a more normal market. You can still sell – it’s just gone back to the way it used to be before interest rates hit rock bottom.”