The UK’s most powerful woman in property, Alison Platt, has never been an estate agent. She has never listed or sold a property, and never been a letting agent.

The CEO of the UK’s largest estate agency, Countrywide, says: “My attitude is to make a virtue of it. Otherwise, I’d spend the next five years apologising for it.

“What I do bring is fresh eyes and experience in sectors which have taught me how to really understand what the consumer wants.”

How many of her board and also her executive team have, like her, never been an agent?

“On the board, only one – Grenville Turner – has actually sold a house, and on the executive team it’s probably two or three.”

However, Platt emphasises that she spends one or two days a week on the front line, out and about at branches and actively seeing for herself what staff do. “Otherwise, the danger is that you sit in head office running the business from spreadsheets,” she says.

“I also get 30 or 40 emails direct into my in-box from customers, and I respond to them all.”

Could she be an estate agent?

“I think I could, but not a brilliant one at first – I would need to build up the experience, and I am always impressed by just how much in-depth local knowledge our best agents have. They are also superb at chivvying things along.”

Platt was appointed just over a year ago, but was not able to join Countrywide from her previous job as an international managing director at healthcare firm BUPA until last September.

She has had not one, but two pairs of big boots to fill: her immediate predecessor was Grenville Turner, now chairman, and before that, Harry Hill who founded the business that now employs over 12,000 people in just over 1,000 branches, and charges an average sales fee of between 1.25% and 1.5%.

Platt’s experience of the industry until last September was as a consumer, having five years ago sold and rented through – fortuitously – Hamptons, now a Countrywide brand.

Was her experience good? Happily, yes. She and her husband Bill had previously had a good experience with Hamptons and simply went straight back to them.

“We did not shop around for any other agent, which is a salutary lesson for the whole industry. Hamptons were fantastic,” she says.

Her husband has evidently been instrumental in Platt’s success. He gave up his own executive career five years ago when she took an international role with BUPA and knew she would be travelling three weeks out of four.

“One of us needed to be at home, and he chose to do so,” says Platt, the mother of a boy now 13 and stepmother of two, and who chooses to start work at around 7am each day in order to get home in time to have evenings with her family.

Born in Oldham and educated in Salford, she eschewed university and came to London at 18 and was a management trainee with Britain Airways, initially pushing trolleys.

Now in her early fifties, the top woman in British estate agency – and possibly in the world – says she does not believe that the industry is particularly macho, but that it does have a legacy issue. She notes that Countrywide itself is “dominated by women, but not at the top end of the organisation”.

She says: “Some of our most successful people are women, but there are not enough of them at senior level. On my executive board there is just one – Kate Brown, our HR director.”

She says one of her own strengths is strategy. Countrywide’s Building our Future review was carried out by 50 people at the firm – and she stresses that not all were in senior positions – between November and February. The exercise, she says, provided fresh thinking and was a big stimulus.

But what about the two senior men, Bob Scarff and Nick Dunning, who suddenly quit Countrywide this spring. Were they sacked? Made redundant?

She says neither. Both men, she says, had been on quite a journey with Countrywide, which came off the stock market, endured the recession and then re-listed as a public company: “Both Nick and Bob were in the same place. It was time for them to go and do other things, and on that basis we shook hands and said goodbye.”

So, what does the Building our Future review mean for the company? In a nutshell, she says, “better to be bigger”.

Currently, Countrywide has a high turnover of staff: “So we need to make it significantly better for both customers and our own people”.

Some offices certainly do far better than others: the top 10% outperform the rest by four to five times. It is, she says, not rocket science as to why this is: the best offices have excellent local managers and motivated staff who enjoy their jobs and stay in them.

Her strategy also identifies considerable growth opportunities in the rented sector, with city centres growing in importance for those who want to rent.

In particular, she says Countrywide needs to be “more assertive” in London where it has put in a below-par performance.

There will be more acquisitions following that of Greene & Co. There will also be more commercial agency activity.

And more investment in digital, including the launch of an online estate agency offering – almost certainly a new Countrywide brand to take on the likes of Purplebricks, easyProperty, eMoov and Hatched.

At the moment, numbers are being crunched and will shortly be presented to the board, measuring the investment that will be needed.

“There is space for an online offering – yes of course there is – and we will have to play in that space. We will do this,” she says.

The image of estate agency generally worries her, and it is Platt herself who volunteers concerns over the issues currently facing Foxtons – namely, the possibility of a class action against it by landlords who faced mark-ups on repairs bills.

“We are great admirers of Foxtons,” says Platt, “but there is scope for much more transparency in our market.

“At Countrywide, we don’t add any levy to landlords but we do take a commission from contractors – it is a small amount.”

Gaining respect, she says, is a key goal for Countrywide: “It is fundamental to our success and will pay huge dividends. This is not an admired sector.”

Countrywide operates its own highly successful portal and Platt says that one third of its business comes from this. The other two-thirds come equally from Rightmove and Zoopla, in which Countrywide has shares.

“We are the two biggest portals’ biggest customers,” she says. “We are agnostic about OnTheMarket, but we could not justify having to come off one of the other portals, as we would be required to do.”

So, some ten months in, is she enjoying her job? “Yes. Absolutely.”