We traded for 25 years in the old high street model of open 9-5, closed at weekends, and two years ago we changed that because customer behaviour changed.

You used to have to ask an estate agent out to value your house and the guide price would come as a surprise. Now the customer very often has as an informed idea of the value of their home as does the agent.

So that 9-5 culture has changed and there is little need for the so-called expert to interpret data which is now freely available.

Two years ago everybody on the sales side came together in a centralised department – there were eight sales negotiators dealing with inquiries and there are now 20.

What we found was that from the first month we started to sell more properties which is curious as we hadn’t changed anything in particular, other than everyone being in a central location.

But when you pick through the data, sales rose because we answer the phone to a sales inquiry just about first time, every single time.

We’ve organised the model around the modern customer so we’re open to 8pm on weekdays and 4pm at weekends and the amount of business we do in those out of hours is great.

Some of our busiest times are in the early evenings… when we first opened on Sundays we received no more than a dozen calls – two years on and this figure has risen well into the hundreds, because people realise we’re available.

We’re one of very few chains of estate agency offices that is significantly increasing their market share – we sell almost double what we used to sell across the whole field of operation, not just Carlisle.

There’s a couple of reasons for that – one is that we’ve organised around the modern customer buying behaviour and the second is that we’re owned by a mutual building society so don’t have shareholders’ premiums to issue every year.

On average we achieve more than 96% of the seller’s guide price and sell one in four homes at asking price or above.

Our fee proposition is really strong – they’re very competitive fees. What we don’t do is try to take an excessive share of our customers' property wealth with a percentage-based model.

It’s broadly the same amount of work for us as an agent if you’re selling a £70,000 apartment as a £300,000 home so we offer a small range of straightforward fixed fees.

We publish every one of our fees – to my knowledge we are the only agent in our operating area who does that – and then you can decide whether you want us to come out or not. That’s what has really helped our business rocket.

Our operational area is from Dumfries to Preston and we have a market share which has grown from 5.5% to 7.5% – that sounds tiny but it’s massive, a 2% increase on a market that’s giving about 35,000 instructions per year.

We’re looking to expand our coverage across more of our building society branch network and increase our market share of sales.

We’ve got ourselves into a position where nearly one in 10 of all properties sold in Cumbria are done so with the Cumberland, we hope to build that to one in five.