Rory Sutherland

My mother didn't know anything about cars, knew a lot about people.

I think she would very reliably go around buying cars just through her assessment of the seller.

And similarly, I think she might do better than someone with an engineering qualification who ignored who the seller was and their personality and character.

Now, as a bit of evidence of this, I discovered because I've been investigating this.

Various real estate agents have said to me that every estate agent does their utmost to make sure that until things are signed and sealed, the vendor never meets the buyer and vice versa.

And the reason for that is if one of them doesn't like the other, they won't buy or sell.

Now, when you think about it, that's completely, unless the person's moving next door.

Obviously, if you're buying a house from someone who's planning to move next door and they turn out to be a psycho, that's relevant information.

But it seems to be the case that if you meet the vendor and you basically don't trust them or think they're a bit shifty, it doesn't matter what the price is, it doesn't matter the condition of the house, suddenly you revise your valuation of the house downwards if you don't like the person selling it to you.

And so that's one of the reasons why apparently real estate agents will leave any kind of contact between the two until after at least a survey has been done and enough commitments taken place.

I once, by the way, I once didn't buy a house basically because the guy was being an asshole about the fridge.

Now, the fridge was only worth, I think, 0.2% of the value of the house, or 0.02% of the value of the house.

I can't quite remember.

But because he was being a dick about the fridge, I no longer trusted him about the house.

Weirdly, it turned out my instinct was right because then a friend of ours went to buy the same house.

They got some separate land registry search done and found out that a chunk of the garden actually belonged to Network Rail, not to the house.

It effectively filched a large part of the garden.

pretty or attractive real estate agents would be more successful than... It's a really interesting question, which is I think, you know, I think we ought to study these things much more because the assumption of an economist is that you need to disintermediate.

You don't need estate agents.

We just go on...