These are villages because we know our merchants, our mayors, our tradesmen, our police chiefs and our taxi drivers.
I'm glad I don't think of my business as a transaction engine that attracts homeowners solely in order to justify the fees inflicted on our tradesmen.
(Does anyone know how to draw lines of fairness to regulate derivatives as the U.S. is about to do? Do we trust the market to do so instead?) If we are to spend our days skeptically double-checking every tradesman's billing, every contact with the marketplace, then it's time we viewed the market itself skeptically.
Two years on, all three flat owners are saving money, and we feel far more comfortable being able to hire our own choice of tradesmen.
"Subcontracting is a big part of our business - many tradesmen subcontract work," RatedPeople chief executive Chris Havemann tells the BBC.
Two of his early publications were a kind of day planner: The Complete Pocket-Book; Or, Gentleman and Tradesman's Daily Journal for the Year of Our Lord, 1763 and The Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum Book.
"Emergency rule in the region has ended, but our wish is that its practices not continue as well," said Halis Gural, 35, a tradesman.
"Our amendment doesn't change the basis for prosecution for someone for carrying a knife, so a tradesman carrying his tools or, as the Deputy Prime Minister seemed overtly worried about, someone carrying a small pen knife are excluded from this by existing legislation".
And it was here, among the memoirs, diaries and letters that tell of our encounters with art, that I came upon the strange case of a lucky – or unlucky – provincial tradesman, as he describes himself, and his love for a long-lost Velázquez.
