Ever tried to compete with a company that can buy a house in five minutes flat?
Tomasz Nowak has. For the better part of two years, that’s basically been her job.
She didn’t win by matching their speed. She won by refusing to try.
The Companies That Made Speed the Whole Pitch
A wave of instant-offer property companies moved into Birmingham and Bristol within months of each other. Upload some photos. Get a cash offer. Sell in days, sometimes hours.
No viewings. No chains. No estate agent standing between a seller and a number on a screen.
For sellers in a hurry, it looked unbeatable. For agents like Tomasz, it looked like the beginning of the end.
Several agencies across both cities didn’t survive the shift. One firm Tomasz had trained under closed its Bristol office within a year of the first platform launching nearby.
Fifteen Years of Doing It the Slower Way
Tomasz had built his career on exactly the opposite of instant. Viewings. Negotiations. Knowing a street well enough to tell a buyer things no listing page would mention.
Fifteen years of that had made him one of the most trusted names in Birmingham property. It had never once felt like a weakness.
Now speed was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. And Tomasz, if he was honest, didn’t have an answer for how a human being competes with an app.
What She Overheard at a Property Conference
Two agents were talking near the coffee station, not realizing Tomasz was close enough to hear.
One of them, half-joking, said he was thinking about building his own instant-offer tool. Faster valuations. An algorithm to guess the price. Beat the platforms at their own game.
The other agent laughed and said something Tomasz couldn’t stop thinking about for weeks afterward.
Girl, nobody’s coming to us because we’re fast. If speed’s all they wanted, they’d already be gone.
It landed harder than either agent probably meant it to. Tomasz had spent months trying to figure out how to out-speed a machine built entirely for speed. He’d never once asked what his actual clients were still coming to him for.
The Shift That Followed
Tomasz stopped chasing turnaround time completely. She couldn’t win that race, and every hour spent trying was an hour not spent on what people were actually paying him for.
Instead, She leaned harder into the slow parts. Longer conversations before a valuation. Walking sellers through what a lowball instant offer would actually cost them, line by line, compared to a proper sale.
She started showing clients the maths side by side. The instant offer. The realistic market value. The difference, in most cases, ran into tens of thousands of pounds.
Some sellers still chose speed anyway, and that was fine. The ones who didn’t became her strongest advocates.
Birmingham, Bristol, and What Came After
The instant-offer platforms are still active in both cities. Still fast. Still tempting for sellers in a genuine hurry.
Tomasz’s business grew across both markets anyway, largely from referrals of people who’d nearly taken a quick offer and were talked, patiently, into waiting for a proper one. Word travelled fast about the agent who’d shown someone the real numbers.
She’s since taken on clients in Cardiff too, brought in by sellers who’d heard the same story secondhand and wanted the same conversation before they decided anything.
Tomasz never built the algorithm the other agent joked about. She didn’t need to. She just stopped trying to be the fast option, and got sharper at being the honest one.
What Is the Lesson for You?
You don’t need a property license, or a robot competitor, for this to apply to your work.
Somewhere in your industry, something automated or instant has probably shown up, promising to do your job faster than you ever could.
The real question was never whether you could match its speed. It’s whether your clients were ever really buying speed from you in the first place.
Has something faster or cheaper ever moved into your space and made you second-guess what you were actually offering people?
