‘If you own – say – a gold bar, it sits in a bank vault and never gives you any trouble. It never complains. You don’t have to repaint it every five years. It just holds, and maybe accrues, value. But the best asset class, by far, is residential property in London. Way better than gold bars, or stocks, or anything. Not only does the asset itself accrue value faster than any other possession, it also pays you rent. It’s magic, as investments go.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘But it comes with all kinds of obligations: you have to find tenants, collect rent, kick out deadbeats, check for carbon monoxide, repair burst pipes, all kinds of hassle and cost. No one wants to be a landlord to deal with all that, they want the asset and the rent, right?’

‘Which is where you come in, as a lettings agent,’ I said. The conversation was making my stomach churn, but I put on a performance of supportive interest. I wanted to appear to be on his side. On the side of the owners.

De Chauncey raised a thick finger. I saw the glint of a thumb ring. ‘Aha. Yes. That’s what a lettings agent does, sure – manage properties on behalf of owners. But, you know, lettings agents don’t have the best reputation. People have all kinds of prejudices about them.’

About you, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

‘What people want – what tenants want – is to deal directly with a person, with their landlord. Even if the service is worse, or at least no better. It’s just a more human experience than dealing with an agent, I guess, you know they have a stake. But, you know, a lot of landlords don’t want that. You might be talking about a high-net-worth individual who owns fifty properties, and who’s much too busy and important to worry about every dripping tap and speck of mould. You might be talking about a Far Eastern or Russian investment consortium that owns 200 properties without even seeing them. These are the entities we’re dealing with. You know, they’re not going to take calls from Colin in Camden whose boiler’s making funny noises. But they do deserve access to the world’s premier investment asset, arguably more so than some amateur with a spanner.

‘But with Bunk’s help, we’ve built software that solves this problem. We’ve been working on it for years, trialling it in the market, and it runs a treat, flawless. Basically, it’s a machine landlord. Not a machine, a program – an algorithm. It can understand tenants’ emails and reply to them, and it’s all linked up to our job management software, so it can order repairs or whatever based on what they say. If – and this is the great part – if it decides that a repair is needed. It’s a clever beast, it makes decisions, filters out the trivial timewasting stuff, and it does it all without bothering a single human being. It knows how often a tenant has asked for something, and it can monitor their word choices for anger or urgency and so on. It’s beautiful.’