Yesterdays Daily Telegraph asks 'Would you spend £15K just to find a home?'
Once upon a time, the only people who used buying agents were celebrities looking for £5m-plus houses... Now, though, even we little people are paying as much as £3,000 upfront for someone to sniff out and secure us the house of our dreams. At which point we have to cough up another 2.5 per cent of the agreed purchase price (£50,000 on a £2m house).
If Christopher Middleton's idea of "we little people" involves buyers of £2m houses, then he seems to be living in some sort of parallel universe, where everyone is on Wayne Rooney's wages.
And with houses currently so scarce, some people are using buying agents to buy properties costing as little as £500,000. This means the agent can walk away with a cheque for £15,000.
Is it worth it? Definitely, says mother of two teenagers Melanie Laidler, who used a buying agency to find the family house in Sussex she was looking for.
“My husband and I knew exactly what we wanted, but the estate agents seemed to take one look at us and decide we couldn’t afford it,” she says.
“After getting nowhere, we went to BDI Homefinders, who helped us buy a place we’d dismissed before because the photos on the particulars had been rather poor, and there weren’t enough bedrooms. Our agent Sam pointed out how easy it would be to add a bedroom, then negotiated us enough of a discount [£1.15m instead of £1.2m] to pay her fees and more.”
A typical story, says seasoned buying agent Saul Empson, of Haringtons. “Most people who come to us have been looking for at least two or three months,” he says. “They’re tired of hearing about other people buying places which they’ve never even got to see.”
Indeed, the golden ticket that buying agents can offer is the one that allows clients in to view a house before it has appeared in the estate agent’s window.
“In October to December last year, more than 70 per cent of houses we acquired for clients never went fully onto the market,” says Jonathan Hopper, managing director of Garrington Homefinders. Other agents report similar levels of off-piste selling.
“We know who’s out there, who’s made a bid, who hasn’t made a bid,” says Peter Mackie of Property Vision, one of the biggest agencies. “We’re all totally embedded in the business.”
Others talk of local knowledge, trade contacts, networks of past clients and even dinner-party and front-doorstep gossip. “I had one of my best tipoffs from the man who delivers my logs,” says Tom Hudson, of specialist rural buying agents Middleton Advisors.
And once you have been whisked through the front door with a metaphorical blanket over your head, the buying agents are keen to clinch you a deal. Though not, it should be said, at any price.
“We know the history of a house, what it has sold for in the past, what comparable houses have sold for recently and whether it has been on the market, and been taken off again,” Empson says.
“In London, we have access to a trade database called Lonres,” says Jo Eccles, of Sourcing Property. “We can access any property’s history, from how much it has been sold for to what work it has had done on it.”
As well as researching the house, the buying agents investigate the area, to find out if a housing estate is liable to spring up on the back doorstep. “The classic mistake is for unwary buyers to go and visit houses in a certain part of Oxfordshire at the weekend,” Empson says. “The planes from RAF Brize Norton don’t fly on a Saturday or Sunday, but it’s a different story in the week.”
**New buyers in Lossiemouth take note - Unfortunately no so much Kinloss at present (Strangely, I do miss the unmistakeable sound of the Nimorod).
Naturally, all buying agencies claim they can save you from making that kind of mistake. So how do you choose between the firms?
The most noticeable difference is the fact that three of them are the buying arms of big estate agencies: Private Property Search (Strutt & Parker), The Buying Solution (Knight Frank) and Prime Purchase (Savills). Does this not represent a conflict of interest?
“Not at all,” says Philip Selway, of The Buying Solution. “We don’t have a privileged position, in terms of Knight Frank telling us about a property but not our rivals.”
“We act for the buyers, and Strutt & Parker act for the sellers,” says Ian Hepburn, of Private Property Search. “There’s a very clear division.”
Even so, Camilla Dell, of buying agency Black Brick, thinks independence is essential. “It’s our unique selling point,” she says. “No one can accuse us of divided loyalties.”
Maybe not, but what people can say is that buying agencies are expensive.
With the odd exception, perhaps, such as London Property Match, run by grandmothers Sarah Snow and Suzanne Emson. They charge only a £587.50 signing-on deposit, plus one per cent of the purchase price.
“They’re these motherly figures who talk total commonsense and cut through all the rubbish from the estate agents,” says Chelsea art dealer James Harvey. “They held our hands the whole way when we bought our house in Battersea.”
So perhaps it is time for the ladies to put their prices up? “Yes, a firm did try to take us over and make us charge two per cent, but we said no,” says Snow, smiling.
“I think one per cent is quite enough, don’t you?”
Good for you ladies !
You will find many estate agents in this area also offer the service, Paul at Moray Property advises they are very happy to act on behalf of a buyer, and have done so successfully quite recently, securing an un-marketed, off-plan new build for a client - Their fees again are a very respectable - £250.00 and 1%.
So if after searching yourself (always to be recommended first) and that ideal property is still eluding you, a buying agent may be the option for you !
Have a good weekend folks & Happy house hunting !
Mr J
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