Long established within the local community, John Smale & Co is a family run, independent estat agent offering high-quality services to its clients throughout North Devon. We invited David Edwards to furnish us with an eye-opening overview of the firm and the services it provides. Since 1990 John Smale & Co has been a Chartered Surveyors and Estate agents offering exemplary service to its clients. David discusses the firm’s growth and how, despite the changes it has seen over recent years, it remains committed to providing a first-class service which cannot be matched by other firms. “Over the past 28 years John Smale & Co has achieved a great deal of success, however we continue to be run as a family business with a husband and wife as the two directors. Collectively, we are a team of eight offering specialist sales, lettings and commercial advice. We pride ourselves on looking after our clients and forming good relationships with them, we want people to be happy with the service they receive. “Although we are not a large company, we compete with the larger chains in the area and aim to offer our clients a unique, service orientated solution. Clients come to us because we offer a personal service. We are not agents who fall into the ‘typical’ bracket of estates agents. We are good at marketing, but we are not aggressive with clients, and this approach is vital as we get a number of clients who have not liked the aggressive nature of some of the other agents. They value our advice and support, as well as the personalised service we provide. As testimony to the success of this approach, we often have more properties listed than many of our larger competitors.” Such personalised service requires a dedicated and collaborative team of staff, and John Smale & Co is extremely proud of its workforce, as David highlights. “To ensure that everyone is able and willing to support their clients to the best of their abilities, as a company we are a close-knit team. We have regular meetings to make sure the relevant teams are all up to date with changes that have occurred with clients and their properties. We have regular training sessions on relevant topics. Staff are very experienced and have been in the industry for a long period of time, and as such they offer the benefit of their experience to our valued clients.” Thanks to the firm’s team of dedicated staff it has achieved phenomenal success over the past year, and David believes that this award showcases how hard everyone at the practice has worked. “At John Smale & Co, we are extremely proud of our team who have driven us to win this prestigious award. This gives us some of the recognition we believe we deserve in a very competitive arena. There are lots of things you can say positively about the company but the reason the company has been around for so long is the fact that we have always offered good advice. The company has certainly stood the test of time, and going forward we intend to build upon our success and support even more clients.” Overall, despite the challenges that the market as a whole faces, David enthuses about the potential that his firm has thanks to its personalised service offering and vast local knowledge. “For the estate agency industry, the past few years have been strange thanks to the uncertainty surrounding Brexit. Here at John Smale & Co, we are well placed again now to expand once the Brexit question is resolved. Following the Brexit decision, it is my belief that the market should then return, and we will no doubt be busier. We also believe the online agents will have a place, but not to such a significance as physical estate agency firms with stores and human interaction at their core. As such, we have serious plans to expand our office and business with acquisition in other areas, and we are always looking to expand into complimentary operations and property related business so that we can offer our clients the service they need and achieve even greater success over the next 28 years.”
