About the network
The story behind our network.
What the Ethical Agent Network is, why it exists, and the people behind it.
What it is
A group of independent agencies measured against one written standard.
The Ethical Agent Network is a collection of independent estate agents from all over the United Kingdom, each of whom has agreed to be measured against the same written standard. An agency cannot just pay to be part of the Network. It has to prove how it treats people first, and it signs eight promises it must continue to honour.
Nobody at the EAN tells a member how to run their business. We aren't a portal, we don't list houses, we are not a regulator and we are not a comparison site.
Why it exists
Anybody can be an estate agent.
Anybody can technically set up an estate agency tomorrow, and we are sure someone will. When searching online the careful ones and the rest look much the same. Meanwhile the person choosing between them is making the largest financial decision of their life, on the strength of one meeting, against somebody whose job includes being persuasive.
The people that annoys most are not the public. It is the agents who do the job properly, because they inherit a reputation they did nothing to earn and spend the first twenty minutes of every valuation working their way out from under it.
So a group of them agreed to be measured. Not by marking their own homework, but on their own public reviews, their own record in their own town, and eight promises signed. The Ethical Agent Network is more than a badge, it's a promise to uphold a standard to be proud of.
How it started
It began with somebody writing about it.
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2018
A journalist starts writing for estate agents
Jerry Lyons, an award winning journalist, began writing content for independent agencies. The Estate Agent Content Club grew out of that: agents in non competing towns, sharing the same writer rather than the same market.
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September 2019
The Karma Club starts
A portion of each member's subscription was put into a pot and distributed directly back into the communities they serve. It has done every month since, totalling more than £50,000.
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2020 to 2023
The same names keep coming up
Years of working with independent agencies produced an obvious pattern: a particular sort of agency kept turning up, doing the right thing for clients, colleagues and their own town, with nobody outside their postcode any the wiser.
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September 2023
The network is announced
Not as a franchise and not as a portal. As a way for that sort of agency to be measured against something written down, and to find each other.
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4 March 2024
It launches, with twenty five members
Alongside an advisory team of eight practising agency owners, drawn from the members rather than appointed from outside. Membership has been by application against published criteria from the first day.
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2026
Nick Cheshire joins as Partner
An estate agent of more than fifteen years who still runs his own independent agency in Essex. He holds the same logo in his own window and is judged on the same standard as every other member.
Our members
A shirt people are proud to put on.
“Agents you can trust”
It is what a member has to be willing to wear.
The mission.
To prove that there is a collective of estate agents who will always do the right thing, and to help them work together and raise their standards as a group rather than one office at a time.
And to make that worth something to the agent as well. Doing the job properly should be an advantage rather than a private virtue nobody outside the business can see. Alongside it, two things that are their own reward: enjoying the people you work with, and putting something back into the communities those businesses are built on.
What the network is actually made of.
A network like us can only be worth so much to you. What it is actually made of is the independent agencies currently in it, with their own reputation on the line, their own teams and their own overheads, who all sign something that lets somebody else take something away from them. Nobody made them do it. There is no law that requires an estate agent to join anything like this. They did it because a standard, where you don't lose anything if it drops, is not a standard. They wanted to be measured against something which they could lose.
See the agencies that passed What happens if a promise is broken
Who runs it.
A team of individuals passionate about doing the right thing, supporting our members, and their communities.
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Jerry Lyons
Founder
Jerry started the Ethical Agent Network and has been publishing on how estate agency ought to be done since 2018. All of that writing is still on this site and none of it is behind a login.
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Nick Cheshire
Partner
Nick has been an estate agent for more than fifteen years and still runs Nest in Essex, an independent agency in Rayleigh. That matters more than it sounds: he holds the same logo in his own window, is judged on the same reviews, and can be removed by the same rule as every other member.
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Ruché
Ruché joined in 2025 and works with members day to day. She answers questions that come in through the site and puts people in touch with the right agent for where they are.
- TBC Joining soon
