NO JOKES about estate agents, please.

“Yes, we do get a lot of flak,” sighs Aubrey Adams, the charmingly smooth boss of Savills, “and I think that is unfair, but then everyone is tarred with a brush, aren’t they? “I think journalists are, as well, and used-car salesmen, and there are probably some very nice used-car salesmen around. In fact, I can even think of one. The chap who sold me my car is a charming man...”

Adams’s eyes have a little twinkle to them now, as you might expect from a boss enjoying a run of good form. Last month Savills reported a 73% leap in profits, underpinning its position as 2003’s best-performing share in the quoted property sector. Fast approaching the FTSE 250, the group operates in a market that shows no signs of bursting.

And just to prove it, Adams sealed the sale a fortnight ago of Britain’s most expensive house, a vast mansion in London’s Kensington, snapped up by Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, for a cool £70m. Spring is here, let’s nail up those For Sale signs.

“Actually,” says Adams with a smile, “I’ve never sold a house in my life.”

Now that’s smooth. Managing director since 1990, group chief executive since 2000, Adams, 54, oversees a £300m- turnover group with 11,500 employees whose interests now include financial services, property investment, facilities management and consultancy as well as the bog-standard “transactional” services for residential and commercial property. Overseeing that lot, Adams is far too busy to sell.

His expertise is organisational, financial — trained as an accountant — and human: estate agencies, like advertising groups and investment banks, are people businesses. Keep the key people happy and incentivised, and the business ticks over nicely. Adams runs Savills on investment-bank lines, with seven-figure bonuses giving his biggest dealmakers the chance to earn more than the boss.

With his jacket off in a downstairs meeting room at Savills’s large London base near Bond Street, he explains the split thus: “The basic culture of agency people is that they are hunters, whereas running a business you need to be more of a farmer — slightly more forward thinking, and more measured in the way you do things.”

Measured is a key Adams adjective. Medium height, smiley, bald and rather more erudite than you would expect from an estate-agency boss, he could, you feel, just as easily be running a top auction house or a smart wine merchant.

“He’s simply very civilised and immensely courteous,” is how his chairman, Richard Jewson, puts it.

He is also one of the few property bosses not to have trained as a surveyor. Yet for a man who sits as a trustee of the esteemed Wigmore Hall concert venue in London, and operates as an Oxfordshire gentleman farmer in his spare time, Adams clearly has a better nose for property than appearances might suggest.

Fans of the business contend that he has cemented Savills’s reputation as a canny operator: it is driven without being too sharp, posh without being too plummy.

Mark Young, property analyst at Oriel Securities, compares it with Lazards, the investment bank, in its prime. “It’s extremely professional, very profit-focused, very success- orientated, and has excellent service delivery, yet Adams is one of the most understated managers you will meet.”