Meet the estate agent who sells property in London — from far-flung beaches

Fresh from a morning’s surfing in Playa Venao on Panama’s Pacific south coast, Luke McCarthy opens his laptop, updates his Instagram — typing the caption “office today” alongside a photo of the glorious beach scene behind his screen — and gets down to his day job: selling multimillion-pound homes in north London’s most desirable neighbourhoods.

“One morning — it was 3am in Panama, 9am in London — I sat in the pitch black, watching a magnificent tropical storm while negotiating the sale of a £4 million house in Primrose Hill,” says the 42-year-old McCarthy, who previously worked for the estate agency Fine & Country before setting up his own agency the Valmont Group last year. “I’d finished my day’s work before anyone else had woken