I started my property journey in a rented Hackney warehouse — no heating, no windows, but excellent parties. From there, the pursuit of a quieter life led me to a boat on London's canals, which felt adventurous and romantic until the second perishingly cold winter of solo living persuaded me otherwise. So, in April 2016, I teamed up with an old friend to buy a shared ownership flat in E1. We were both single, both tired of paying other people's mortgages, and cautiously optimistic. Two months later, the country voted to leave the EU.

Naivety, denial, or just a determined sense of needing to get on with life — we didn't pull out. We became homeowners that October (albeit partial ones). Uncertainty and all.

That's been the pattern ever since, if I'm honest. Not reckless optimism, just life moving faster than — and out of sync with — the news cycle. And I suspect I'm not alone in that. Most people don't time their property decisions around geopolitical stability. They time them around their actual lives.

When I eventually sold the E1 flat in 2023, it was valued lower than what we'd paid seven years prior. Unexpected, frustrating, and a useful corrective to the assumption — held loosely, and based on not very much — that London property only ever goes up. The idea that bricks and mortar is a reliable investment isn't, I've come to realise, always the case. You get lucky and you get unlucky, sometimes regardless of how sound your reasoning was.

The 2025 sale of our Margate home was a different kind of difficult. Our first buyers pulled out, spooked by rising interest rates. Our second tried to renegotiate significantly below their offer after the mortgage valuation. Third time around, we found people who brought a genuinely collaborative spirit to proceedings and honoured what they'd said they would. It took over a year. By the time we could finally move, our twins — unexpected, wonderful and entirely consuming — were 18 months old, and all four of us had been sharing a bedroom for the duration.

Here's what I keep coming back to: most of the time, you're not buying or selling because the conditions are perfect. You're doing it because your life has moved on and so you have to too. A growing family, a relationship, a loss, a new chapter. The world being unstable in the background — energy prices, interest rates, wars in Europe and Iran, whatever fresh anxiety the week has produced — is noise you simply have to move through. Even if buyers hesitate, lenders tighten, and confidence shifts.

Which is precisely why who you have guiding you along the way matters more than people tend to acknowledge. The property system in the UK operates on something close to blind faith. An offer is, in legal terms, little more than a cringingly old-fashioned gentleman's agreement — nothing properly binds a buyer to their word, which you feel acutely when they walk away because they've been unsettled by something beyond either of your control.

The crux of a sale isn’t the offer you make or accept, it’s the completion. The done and the dusted. A good estate agent doesn't just handle the paperwork. They're reading the room, managing the relationships, and quietly advocating for you in conversations you're not part of. When the ground is shifting — and lately, it always seems to be shifting — it's no small thing.

What counts most, in the end, is whether a move allows your life to progress in the way you need it to. You can't control the wider forces at play. But you can choose how you navigate them, and who you trust to help you through.

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Laura Jean Sargent is one of Brickworks' creative collaborators; a seasoned content consultant and copywriter with over 20 years’ experience across creative and luxury lifestyle sectors.