What happens if you think a broker has undervalued your campervan - Jeremy's Peugeot Boxer

The van has an unusually good story attached to it. It began life in 2013 as a plain Peugeot Boxer 333 panel van owned by the NHS, which ran it as a minibus - which is why it still has an automatic step that swings out whenever the side door is opened, a detail no self-builder would have fitted and one that a buyer with mobility in mind would notice immediately. In the summer of 2019 it was professionally converted by Pendle Campervans, and Jeremy and his wife have been its only other owners.

The conversion is a proper one rather than a weekend project: a rock and roll double bed with integrated rear seating, a twin gas hob, a fridge that runs on both 12v and 240v, a sink with an electric pump drawing from a fresh water tank under the unit, a diesel heater plumbed into the van's own fuel tank, a swivel passenger seat, internal blinds, 12v lighting throughout, full insulation and carpeting, and a figure-of-eight awning rail on the roof. There is no shower and no toilet, and that was in the advert from the start.

This is exactly the kind of vehicle that is hard to price from a keyboard. A coachbuilt motorhome can be looked up: the model tells you the layout, the year tells you most of the rest. A converted panel van tells you almost nothing until you know who converted it, when, and to what standard - and the gap between a professional 2019 conversion and a well-meaning home build can be many thousands of pounds on the same base vehicle in the same year. That gap is the whole reason this sale started with a disagreement about price.

He got a reply the same evening making one thing explicit: the figure was a guide rather than something set in stone, the person answering was not the person who sets prices, and it would be passed to the valuation team to look at again. With brokerage the advertised price is agreed with the seller, not imposed - it is written into an agreement that nobody has signed yet, and it is the single biggest factor in how much interest a listing gets. There was no reason to defend a number that had been produced without ever seeing the van.

The next morning Keaton rang him. Jeremy was on a tram and could barely speak, so Keaton kept it to one request: send photographs, today if possible, and we will get it re-valued. He followed it up with a WhatsApp message so Jeremy had a number to send them to. His internal note on the file that morning was blunt and, as it turned out, correct: requested photos for re-value, I believe we can do better than £10k.

What came back a few hours later was the thing that actually moved the price. Not an argument - a specification. Jeremy sent a detailed written breakdown of the van: the professional 2019 conversion and everything in it, the two owners from new, the NHS history and the automatic step it left behind, the dimensions, the 18-month-old leisure battery, the awning rail. Then ten photographs and a walkaround video. He even corrected himself an hour later on the roof height and promised to check it properly when he got home.

The re-valuation ran on 29 June with all of that in front of it, and the difference it made was the difference between a van we could not really assess and a documented professional conversion with a low-mileage base vehicle and a clean MOT record. Billy rang him on 30 June and spent thirteen minutes going through it. The agreement that followed put the advertised price at £12,000, with £10,000 of that going to Jeremy - the same £12,000 he had named off the top of his head on the very first phone call.

He raised one honest doubt about all this in his interview afterwards, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a quiet edit.

It is a fair question, and the file answers it. The number he typed on the form was £10,000 and the first valuation came back at £10,000 - so on his own evidence, the anchor did hold at first. What broke it was not him asking for more. He asked for more on 28 June and was told the same day that the price was not for the person he was speaking to to set. The figure moved on 29 June, when photographs and a full specification arrived, and it moved to £12,000 rather than to whatever he had asked for. Then the market marked it: it sold at £11,000, above his original guess and below the advert.

The first was booked on 10 July for 11:30 the following morning. Woody rang Jeremy that afternoon to check he was happy with how it would work, and Jeremy asked the question most first-time sellers ask: they come to my house, I show them round, and I am not comfortable with a test drive - is that normal? It is. The answer he got was that if there is a test drive at all, he goes in the van, and that we would call the buyer to check they were genuine before the address was released.

At 8:42 the next morning the buyer cancelled. Woody had left him a voicemail about a minute earlier and could not get him back on the phone afterwards. He rang Jeremy within minutes, apologised, and said he would keep trying to rearrange. Jeremy was cleaning the van at the time.

That is the honest cost of selling anything: some people do not turn up. What a broker can do about it is narrow. It cannot make a buyer keep an appointment. It can make sure the seller is not still waiting on the driveway an hour later, and it can keep enough other interest in play that one cancellation is an annoyance rather than a disaster.

Which is roughly what happened. The next day, Sunday 12 July, Malachy rang first thing with a buyer who wanted to come that same afternoon - a woman about an hour away who had owned a motorhome before and wanted something smaller she could also use as a runaround. Jeremy was due at the cricket and said so cheerfully; the viewing was arranged for as close to midday as could be managed, and she came. A third viewing was booked on 14 July for the following Sunday, and that buyer cancelled too, three days out.

He was equally clear about what he did not want at the front end of the process: “I didn't want buyers coming from Marketplace or from eBay or anywhere and offering ridiculous.” Between those two sentences sits most of the case for using a broker at all, and it is worth setting out concretely rather than as reassurance.

It is worth being precise about what a brokerage does and does not do here. We advertise the van, field the enquiries, vet the buyers, handle the negotiation and book the viewings - but the seller hosts the viewing, at their own home, at a time they have approved. Jeremy showed every buyer round himself. What he did not have to do was find them, screen them, or work out whether the money was real. If you want the mechanics step by step, they are set out on how selling with Motorhome Pig works.

Thirty days from the first enquiry to the money in the bank; seventeen of them with the van live on the open market. Advertised at £12,000, sold at £11,000, £9,500 to Jeremy and a flat £1,500 fee that he knew about from his first phone call and that he paid only because it sold.

The number that would look best in a headline is the £2,000 the advert went up by after the re-valuation. The number Jeremy talks about is none of them. What he describes is a sale where he never had to advertise, never had to weed out the people who were never going to buy, never had to take an envelope of cash on trust, and got to hand a van he had loved for seven years to somebody he had met and liked.