What you describe is pretty much how it worked everywhere. A mate of mine worked in a West London estate agency (Faron Sutaria) for three years from about 89. He'd worked at a bank counter but got bored and wanted to try something else.
It was an incredibly throat-cutting environment. He had no office mates, just duplicitous rivals. There was one set of keys to each property and you had to book them and sign them out via the manager, who watched you sign them out and back in. This was to ensure that two agents, who were at all times in competition with each other, couldn't turn up at the same property at the same time with rival buyers. It also made it harder for a rival to 'lose' or hog a set of keys to thwart bookings by other agents.
Where there were multiple bids for a property, they all had to be shown to the vendor, but the manager decided which was pushed as the agency's 'recommended' bid. Usually, not always, this was the highest bid, but sometimes if the highest bidder was a known flake, the manager would pick a lower one and warn the vendor off.
DV describes this process happening on SJL's office that morning.
If your buyer wasn't advanced as the 'best' to the vendor, you could try to get him / her to gazump the buyer who had been recommended by upping the bid above the others.
I was aware of the practice of gazumping in 1989 but wasn't aware, until my mate told me, that if you were gazumped on a property, that had almost certainly been organised by another employee of the same agency.
Whoever brought the buyer who exchanged on the property got 15% of the agency's commission, which at the time was either 2 or 2.25%. The agency kept the rest. Everyone else got nil. If you had a buyer bidding £130,000 for a property and it went to your colleague's client bidding £132,000 for it, your colleague would get paid £396 for that sale. You would get zilch. If you sold one such property a week, which was a typical target, you'd make about £20,000 a year on top of your basic. This at the time was by design not enough to live on - so you had to sell.
My buddy lasted about three years and packed it in because it was so epically vicious. He gave me two interesting pieces of advice when next I sold. One was never do joint agency because then neither agency will bother doing viewings in case the place is about to be offered on via the other one - waste of time. The other was don't list with an agency who's too far away. If the agency's in Notting Hill they'll never show anyone your flat in e.g. Little Venice; it's too far and they'll have no others to show you nearby to make best use of the time out of the office.
SJL mentioned at the party she went to on the Saturday that she was expecting a £3,000 commission. This sounds like she was in line for her share of property sales totalling about a million pounds, presumably payable at month-end that Thursday.
