Wetherell wins again

The Mayfair stalwart and Spear’s alumnus adds another trophy to his cabinet as he wins Central London Single office of the year award, reports Arun Kakar

Reigning Spear’s property adviser of the year Peter Wetherell now finds himself in the top one per cent of UK estate agents after scooping the award for best Central London single office at the estate agents of the year awards 2019.

Judges and independent experts assessed over 25,000 estate and letting agents in the UK, with each branch scored against a set of performance and customer service criteria gathered over a 12 month period. Wetherell has focused on Mayfair during his over-35 year career, and was credited with keeping the postcode ‘on its feet during challenging times’, at last year’s Spear’s Wealth Management Awards. Despite advising over £1 billion in residential instructions, Wetherell notes a challenging year for the area.

‘Values have pretty much maintained themselves, which is good,’ he tells Spear’s. ‘Our concerns are on the volume of the transactions which are now down 20 per cent on last year and 50 per cent on 2013.

‘That’s purely due to stamp duty, its due to all the changes to taxation for overseas people, and it’s just that the purchasers now are people that are going to be buying for a decade or a generation. You can’t have these high transactional costs if you just dip in and dip out.’

Wetherell – whose Twitter handle is aptly titled @mayfairguru – counts local businesses, celebrities, hoteliers, overseas investors, politicians, planners and landowners as part of his network in the district. Despite the current climate, his attitude towards the patch remains sanguine.

‘Whether it’s cultural, whether it’s social with the restaurants, whether it’s the visitors to the hotels […]; everything about Mayfair at the moment is top of its game, and people are recognising that,’ he says. ‘The residential part is the last piece of the jigsaw […] – I’ve never known as many private club openings ever in my career, and they’re all based in Mayfair.’

Wetherell also points out the timeliness of the awards on 12 October: the same day that the government announced that it will again be looking to improve industry standards through a new working group chaired by Lord Best. Experts from the sector will consider options on regulation and mandatory qualifications for all property agents, a move Wetherell welcomes.