A brokerage built around a very small number of houses

Collectors, family offices and overseas principals who buy through Jorty are assigned one senior advisor for the life of the relationship. That advisor holds the viewing calendar, the diligence questions and the negotiation — and remains the person who answers the telephone after closing.

Registered clients see the confidential catalogue first: residences that will never be syndicated, and a short list of houses we are preparing to admit. We do not circulate inventory to prove activity. If there is nothing we would buy ourselves, the letter that week is empty.

The group now advises principals in fourteen countries. The work is still done from the same table in Hayward. Distance is a logistics problem; representation is not.

Before anything is published we prepare a private valuation drawn from comparable placements — including off-market transactions the public record never sees — rather than from portal averages. The note includes a written view on the buyer profile most likely to transact, and an honest opinion on whether the house belongs on the registry at all.

Owners who need a number, and not a listing, are not a lesser client. Valuations are prepared without obligation and are never shared outside the firm. If the right course is to wait, or to place the house only with a named principal, we will say so.

Every accepted residence receives a monograph: photography, an architectural narrative, and a provenance dossier produced at our cost and the owner’s to keep. Where a house has a documented author, we say so and we can prove it. Where the record is thinner than the marketing usually claims, we leave the attribution blank.

Curation is also a refusal. We decline houses whose permit history will not survive diligence, whose additions have erased the original work, or whose only distinction is square footage. The registry is deliberately small because the alternative is a shop window.