Twenty years ago I left a career in investment banking to start a property firm with no clients, no listings and a theory: that London’s international buyers deserved someone on their side of the table — a personal banker for property, who stayed for the life of the asset rather than leaving at completion.

Arbitrage Group turns twenty this year. An anniversary is a licence to look back briefly, so here is an honest accounting: what changed, what held, and what I would tell the man who started.

What changed

Almost everything about the market. I founded the firm into the final years of the great boom, survived 2008 as a two-year-old business, and advised through the strangest sequence any of us will live through: the post-crisis surge, the 2014 peak, Brexit, a pandemic, and then a decade in which prime central London — the asset the whole world assumed only went up — went roughly nowhere. Values today remain more than a fifth below their 2014–15 peak. Anyone who tells you they predicted that sequence is decorating their memory.

The buyers changed too. Twenty years ago discretion was a preference; today, in a world of ownership registers, data brokers and AI search, privacy has to be engineered deliberately, at the moment of the transaction. And the closed club that once controlled access to the best buildings loosened — the advantage moved from whoever held the most listings to whoever held the most trust.

What never did

We still act only for buyers, and are never paid by the other side. We have still never advertised — not once — and almost every client has come because another client sent them, which means every instruction we have ever taken has been an audition for the next. Every client still has my personal mobile number.

And the deepest thing never changed: the best opportunities were never in the shop window. Not in 2006, not in the boom, not in the crisis, not now. The buildings that matter still change hands through relationships, research, patience and the willingness to ask an owner a question they were not expecting. The visible market is the surface. It always was.

What I would tell the man who started

Three things. The advice you are proudest of will be the deals you talk clients out of — they remember those longer than the ones you complete. The property is never the value; the coherence around it is, and you will spend more of your career coordinating bankers, tax advisers and solicitors than viewing buildings, and it will matter more. And the market will humble you regularly, so become comfortable saying “I do not know” early — it is the most underrated sentence in this business.

The boy in Naples who stared at buildings would not quite believe where the staring led. Twenty years in, I still walk the streets early, before the shops open, reading them the way I learned to at home. Some things you do not outgrow. You just find a way to make them the job.

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Aldo Attanasio d’Aponte is the founder and chief executive of Arbitrage Group, founded in 2006 — a boutique buyer-side advisory specialising in prime central London real estate. This article is general commentary and not financial, legal or tax advice.