Published: 06/04/2020 By Patrick Henry
Not much had been conveyed to us by the Prime Minister, apart from an instruction to shut our doors. A thought ran through my mind that we could easily work from the office and not allow customers inside, as there were still plenty of offices that were functioning as normal, simply because they weren’t on the High-street. That idea lasted for a whole 10 seconds before I reverted back to the original plan of clearing up and securing the office, grabbing the essentials and putting the plan in place that we had been working on for the past couple of weeks. In a bizarre twist to the day, we received an email from one of our clients asking us to let 7 of their properties! It seems that there were others with far worse fortune than ours, as the short-let company that had been managing these 7 properties for our client had just slipped into administration. As we didn’t know what would be happening over the coming months, weeks or even days we decided to attend the 2 properties out of the 7 that were empty and record videos in a ‘walk-through’ fashion. This would serve two purposes; one would be to take a rudimentary inventory of the property for our client and the other would be so that we could show potential tenants around without any of us having to leave our homes. We had already recorded videos for the rest of our available properties in an attempt to minimise unsuccessful viewings and disruption to current tenants’ lives, and we successfully let a property using a video that we recorded the previous week. As today was likely to be our last opportunity to get into these properties (at least for the next three weeks), we quickly scrambled to get all of the footage that we needed.
Back in the office we secured all valuables and our clients’ information, loaded our cars with our computers and finally toasted to our health over a semi chilled bottle of champagne (which was gifted to us by a happy client, back when the world seemed normal).