For the players in London’s estate agencies, Jon Hunt’s announcement in May last year that he was selling Foxtons came as a minor earthquake. With only 21 branches to its name, Foxtons may not have been the capital’s biggest estate agency chain. But Foxtons was far and away the most notorious.

If any firm epitomised the excesses of the property boom, it was Foxtons. This, after all, was the agency that employed the youngest, pushiest staff (referred to as “16-year-old oiks” by rivals) and promised the highest rents and sale prices to win business. Only a few years before, the Office of Fair Trading had fined it for tearing down rival agents’ “for sale” boards and putting its own up in front of houses it had no mandate to sell. In short, Foxtons – of which Hunt owned 97 per cent – was the mean kid on the London estate agency block.