Is Letting Agency a Bullshit Job?

The Existential Doubt of the Modern Letting Agent

If a letting agent vanished tomorrow, would anyone notice? David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs, asked a similar question about much of modern work: if your job disappeared and the world carried on exactly the same, perhaps it was never real work to begin with. For many letting agents, this thought lands uncomfortably close to home.

The day-to-day reality of agency life often feels like a performance. Endless compliance uploads, meaningless certificates, unread email chains, and data input rituals carried out in service of some abstract god of regulation. We sense that we are doing something necessary—that the housing system would collapse without us—yet we also feel complicit in a grand illusion. Somewhere between the tenant portal and the DPS log-in, we lost sight of the point.

Letting agency was once a noble profession: representing property owners, mediating the exchange of shelter, providing local expertise and human understanding. Today, much of it has been bureaucratised into a kind of clerical purgatory, a domain of paper shuffling masquerading as value creation. And yet, within that, a small ember of genuine purpose still burns—for those who choose to see it.

Graeber’s Bullshit Job Archetypes in Letting Agency

Graeber identified five main species of the bullshit worker. Each of them can be found alive and well within the modern letting agency.

Flunkies exist to make others feel important—the negotiator whose job is to nod sympathetically at landlords while saying little of substance, or the office assistant whose primary role is to provide the illusion of activity. Their existence reassures clients that someone, somewhere, is handling things.

Goons are those hired for zero-sum competition. In lettings, they appear as agents undercutting each other on fees, fighting for the same landlords, or serving as the enforcement arms of corporate chains. Their victories produce no net social value—they simply shift market share from one logo to another.

Duct Tapers fix the faults of bad systems. The staff member who spends half the week re-uploading documents because the CRM didn’t sync with Rent Smart Wales; the manager chasing contractors to resend an invoice because the PDF was in the wrong format. Their purpose is not to prevent failure, but to make failure slightly more bearable.

Box Tickers abound in compliance culture. They produce evidence of safety, not safety itself. The gas certificate, the right-to-rent photo, the GDPR acknowledgement—rituals of reassurance. They exist so that someone, somewhere, can say “We did what was required.”

And finally, Taskmasters invent work for others. They set KPIs, roll out new inspection templates, or send Monday-morning motivational emails. Their real task is to justify their own existence within a system that no longer measures value by outcomes, but by activity.

Graeber’s question lingers: how much of what we do in lettings genuinely adds value to landlords, tenants, or communities? And how much merely sustains the illusion of a functioning housing system—one designed more for bureaucratic self-preservation than human utility?

Enter the Machine – AI as the Perfect Bullshit Worker

hit Worker

Artificial intelligence is the perfect employee for a bullshit job. It doesn’t complain, it doesn’t need meaning, and it can perform administrative rituals faster and cheaper than any human. The average letting agent’s day—chasing certificates, updating portals, copying data from one system to another—is a feast for automation.

If AI can do 80% of your work, the uncomfortable truth is that much of your work was designed for machines, not people. The system built you into a compliance processor. AI is merely replacing you at the function it designed you to perform.

But this isn’t the end of agency—it’s the exposure of its core. Machines can process data, but they can’t interpret it. They can issue reminders, but they can’t negotiate with the reality of a tenant who just lost their job, or a landlord balancing cash flow against conscience. The survival of the independent agent will depend on this interpretive skill—the human ability to navigate the rules without being ruled by them.

Marina Karkalova and the Rigged System

Marina Karkalova argues that modern systems are rigged to promote either obedience or exploitation. The honest worker drowns in red tape while the opportunist learns to manipulate it. The system rewards those willing to play the game, not those who try to reform it.

In lettings, this dynamic is obvious. Government agencies proclaim to protect tenants while outsourcing enforcement to local councils with no capacity to act. Landlords are regulated as if they were criminals-in-waiting, while corporate housing firms enjoy tax incentives and preferential lending. Independent agents are crushed between the costs of compliance and the race to the bottom in fees.

Good people are punished with exhaustion; assholes thrive through cynicism. And yet, the true villain isn’t either—it’s the system that sets them against each other.

The Cure – Knowledge, Autonomy, and System Creation

If the system is rigged, the only cure is understanding it deeply enough to step outside it. Graeber believed emancipation began when workers recognised the absurdity of their labour. Karkalova believes freedom begins when we learn to stop serving the rigged hierarchy and start creating parallel ones.

For letting agents, this means radical competence. Not surface-level compliance, but strategic understanding of the legislation, the economics, and the incentives driving housing policy. To know not just what the rules are, but why they exist—and for whose benefit.

When you understand that most housing law is designed to control risk for lenders and central authorities, not to protect people, you start to see the lines between enforcement and theatre. And within those lines, opportunities for autonomy appear.

An independent agent who masters the law can choose when to comply strictly, when to interpret flexibly, and when to build parallel systems—such as private tenancy frameworks, landlord alliances, or collective maintenance networks. The goal is not rebellion for its own sake, but freedom through literacy.

Agents as Architects of Parallel Systems

Agents who know the system better than the bureaucrats can operate in spaces they don’t even see. They become cartographers of reality rather than clerks of compliance. Instead of waiting for permission to act, they design their own operating principles and alliances.

This is not fantasy. It’s already happening: independent agents building their own digital systems, private compliance clubs, and landlord support networks outside the state’s apparatus. These are the seeds of a parallel market—a decentralised ecosystem run by those who understand the game and have opted out of its moral theatre.

In this model, clients are no longer marks to be managed, but participants in a voluntary exchange of value. Even the so-called “asshole landlords, tenants and other letting agents” can be reinterpreted: not as moral failings, but as players responding rationally to a distorted incentive structure. When you understand the system that produces them, you stop taking their behaviour personally. You start playing at a higher level.

The Bullshit Job Becomes the Rebel Trade

So, is letting agency a bullshit job? It was. It became one the day agents surrendered their independence to bureaucracy and let compliance replace judgment. But it doesn’t have to remain that way.

When knowledge replaces blind obedience, when agents understand the mechanics of housing law, finance, and human behaviour better than the technocrats who regulate them, the bullshit evaporates. What remains is the original craft: mediation between people and property, trust and shelter, reality and regulation.

Graeber saw bullshit jobs as the ultimate symptom of a dying system. Karkalova saw that system as the disease itself. The cure, for letting agents, is not to wait for reform but to reclaim the word agency in its truest sense: the power to act with awareness and intention.

The future belongs to those who build parallel systems of value—micro-economies of competence, trust, and self-direction. Those who master the system can step outside it. Those who step outside it can shape what comes next.

Letting agency only becomes a bullshit job when the agent forgets who they are. The moment they remember, it becomes a weapon of sovereignty.

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