William Tellwright, 57, is an estate agent — but not the kind you are used to. His car is not painted with a company insignia; in any case, usually he will walk to your home. Nothing of his office, which is above a sushi restaurant on London’s Notting Hill Gate, suggests his profession. He has no website beyond a spartan page holder with his contact details, you will never see his name under a property listing and he has never placed an advert.
If you meet, it will be because your friend has recommended him. You will live in Notting Hill, Kensington, Marylebone or Holland Park — the only areas he has covered in his 26-year career — and he will come to you. He will be punctual to the minute, arriving in a suit tailored for him on Savile Row, a tie and freshly polished shoes (he may refer to being a soldier “about 100 years ago” and quip bashfully that having polished shoes is half the job of selling a home). He will not raise it but, if you ask, he will tell you he does four or five deals a year, of which a couple are “north of £20mn”.
He may warn you that your home will take a year to sell, maybe two. If he thinks the market is dead, or that no one will want your home, he will try to persuade you not to sell at all. He will be impeccably polite until you discuss the price, when he will become impeccably assertive. If you are asking too much, he will tell you. If he agrees to sell your home — and it will be him, since he works alone — there will be no brochure. He may not even bother with photos, beyond a snapshot of the facade.
In the rarefied world of the property market’s most expensive homes, where discretion is everything and sales can be a magnet to opportunists, “secret” super-prime agents such as Tellwright have a cosy niche. 144 homes sold for more than £10mn in London 2024, according to Knight Frank, a further 78 for more than $20mn in Manhattan, according to Douglas Elliman.
Buyers and sellers of these homes rate privacy highly. Brochures (when they exist) are kept tight to ensure anonymity and avoid unwitting advertising to burglars. Many sales will never go near the internet, disclosed to only a handful of wealthy individuals and their buying agents (the combined value of London homes for sale off-market reached £1.96bn in January, up from £1.26bn two years earlier, according to LonRes).
Another hazard they circumnavigate is the fringe entourage of wealthy clients who improvise involvement in a home sale to facilitate a commission. British buying agents share numerous stories of being cancelled, stood up or otherwise duped by someone who claimed to represent the seller of a high-value home, but did not.
Henry Pryor, a buying agent, describes such opportunists as “a menace — typically they haven’t signed agreements with who they claim to be representing and they’re clueless when it comes to their responsibilities, like anti-money laundering checks”. Responding to information from one such “privateer”, Pryor recently drove two hours to view a home in Gloucestershire only to learn from the owners that they had no plans to sell.
“Secret” agents set themselves apart. They know what they need to know about you, and the world you move in, and no more. If you are selling a home, they emerge when required, then disappear. If they are helping you buy one, they know what you want almost better than you do. Think an old-school butler: invisible until you realise you need them, and then already there.
Philippe’s introduction to London high-street selling agents was inauspicious — burned buying a flat in Notting Hill that the agent hadn’t (unsurprisingly) flagged vibrated with the rumbling Tube below.
Fourteen years later, relocating from Dubai, after selling his asset management business, with a family and keen not to repeat the process, two friends independently introduced him to under-the-radar agent Laurent Lakatos. The two men hit it off. Both from Paris, they had grown up in similar tall-windowed, antique-strewn Haussmann-era apartments in the 16th arrondissement. They connected over their shared history, culture and tastes, and a mutual dislike of the narrow multi-storey London town houses in which, they agreed, one spent half the day walking up and down stairs. Lakatos spoke little of his business and not at all of other clients. “I’m giving advice to people who want to achieve the same sort of things in life as me,” he says. “It’s primordial to be very discreet.”
“Laurent and I had long conversations about many different things, he became, not a close friend, but a friend,” says Philippe.
Philippe employed Lakatos to help him in his home search. Ultimately, Philippe’s wife found a flat in a mansion block on Kensington’s Campden Hill Road through another agent, but when the couple decided to sell the same home early last year, Philippe gave Lakatos a call.
The high-street agent who had sold them the home back in 2018 now told Philippe he was asking too much. Lakatos, too, was sceptical: interest rates were high, buyers were thin on the ground and someone else was selling a home in the same block. “Her apartment is about the same size,” Lakatos told Philippe. “She’s been asking £1.5mn less than you for several months and she still hasn’t sold.”
Nevertheless, he agreed to take on the sale.
The flat was stamped with character. The furniture mixed contemporary with French and British antiques; sculpture jostled with an eclectic painting collection: figurative oil portraits; large abstract canvases; a portrait of an unknown Vietnamese woman bought on a family trip to Hanoi.
Three months later, Lakatos sold the apartment to a recently divorced Russian woman with a child, for £6.1mn — a record in the building. It wasn’t so much that he knew people with the money to buy a home like this, although he knew plenty. It was that he had sought out the ones who could imagine themselves living there.
“Laurent saw it would appeal to someone who liked art and who could project themselves into it,” says Philippe. “The people he brought [to view it] — he understood their tastes.”
Insiders estimate that roughly two dozen London under-the-radar agents genuinely specialise in super-prime homes. Where they fit in the traditional industry bifurcation between buying and selling agents is unclear. Guy Meacock, of buying agent Prime Purchase London, says they all work — like Tellwright and Lakatos — for buyers as well as sellers and that combining roles in this way risks a conflict of interest, tempting an agent acting for a buyer to favour homes they have also been instructed to sell.
“Once upon a time, it was ‘never the twain shall meet’; today I can’t think of one in that number that does only sales,” he says.
At a time when the market for super-prime homes is stalling, however, clients seem comfortable with such theoretical conflicts if the result is a sale. Sales of £10mn-plus homes fell 20 per cent in London last year, according to Knight Frank; in Manhattan, those sold for over $20mn went for 14 per cent below asking price, on average, according to Douglas Elliman.
New York, where realtors typically work alone (but under the umbrella of a broker that they pay for services such as compliance and administration) and act for both buyers and sellers, is the spiritual home of the lone-wolf high-end agent.
The most successful combine the skills of investment adviser, lawyer, host and psychotherapist, sewing themselves into the fabric of high-end society. Although a lower proportion of very expensive homes sell off-market than in London, discretion remains paramount. Few have achieved the combination as effectively as Alice Mason, the property fixer and socialite, who died last year aged 100.
Mason facilitated her work by hosting black-tie dinner parties at her Upper East Side apartment, which attracted some of America’s richest, most famous and most powerful figures, from Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter to Estée Lauder and Gloria Vanderbilt. She developed a reputation for prising the newly rich into the most exclusive Manhattan co-operative buildings, calling in social favours to negotiate their infamously stuffy selection boards. Today’s alpha female New York agents like to describe themselves as “a younger Alice Mason”.
Perhaps inevitably, a business so deeply enmeshed in confidences and relationships ends up recruiting some unlikely individuals.
Ellen Greene, who is in her sixties, trained as an opera singer in Austria, then with a teacher in Manhattan, before a stint in a jazz trio alongside pianist Cyrus Chestnut. Like her biography, her current professional credentials — which include massage therapist and aesthetician — don’t exactly telegraph high-end home agent.
But Greene is about to complete her first sale — for $20mn.
The journey began 25 years ago when she met Lisa Simonsen, then a personal trainer. The two swapped stories and tips on dealing with demanding clients, and became friends. When Simonsen retrained as a realtor, she took her friend aside: “Next time someone tells you they’re looking for a home, remember me.”
In Greene’s work on the massage bench, consulting with a client or when her practice extended to palliative therapies, confidences were often shared. Inevitably, she got to know their tastes, their social lives, and how they lived — and often if a client wanted to sell their home or replace their estate agent.
“There are boundaries,” she tells me on a call from New York. “If someone isn’t ready, it’s not worth losing a client and a friendship for an introduction.” But if the moment was right, she’d mention Simonsen’s name, much as she would make recommendations for other areas of their lives.
Greene recently completed her real estate licence to work more formally with Simonsen. But for years, she greased home-buying wheels without a fee. London-based Jonathan Travers, of Stanhope Cooper, who arranges insurance for high-value homes and their contents across the world, also considers it part of his service.
His clients, like Greene’s, use him as a sounding board. One, who lives with his family in England’s Home Counties, recently shared he was looking for a Mayfair home near his office, and had up to £20mn to spend.
“I knew he liked apartments, and I knew of a [buying agent] who was good for finding off-market apartments, so I introduced them,” says Travers.
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Given the value of such introductions, many agents work to foster relationships with those whose professional responsibilities include face time with potential clients. Prove their discretion and expertise to these professionals, and agents can hope for a place in the client’s trusted circle, and the first call when they come to buy or sell a home.
“Lawyers, investment advisers, accountants, trust advisers, art advisers, architects, interior designers, jewellers . . . ,” Simonsen interrupts the list to tell me she has just been to lunch with one of Moncler’s most senior personal shoppers, and a client they share, who recently spent $500,000 on ski clothes. A friend at Gulfstream keeps her posted on his latest sales, helping her map the top 0.01 per cent: “So-and-so has just bought a Bombardier [the jet retails for roughly $35mn], such and such owns a Falcon.”
Her first big lead came from someone she nearly dismissed as a crank. Screening a call from an unknown number, she later collected a voicemail in broken English. It turned out to be the newly hired house manager for a family “worth several billion” who were looking for a Manhattan home. Simonsen found them two apartments in the prestigious Plaza, 1 Central Park, which they bought for a total of $50mn — homes she later sold for them, too.
“It was a lesson to take every [lead] seriously, those types — just like [you would] the Ivy League private bankers,” she says. “If I hadn’t returned that message, I’d have missed $100mn worth of sales.”
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