All the help you need to prepare, search, evaluate, bid, secure and get moved into your next home.

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We are buying agents. We search for homes and seek to acquire them on behalf of our clients. As far as the law is concerned, we are estate agents – we just happen to act for buyers, not sellers. We buy properties between £500,000 and £50m. Some clients just want help looking for a new home, some want help to evaluate a property and to negotiate the best deal. Spending a six figure sum is something most people do on average every ten years.

We act for 30 – 40 clients a year. Despite rocketing prices & endless ‘best & final offers’ our clients typically paid 5% less than the quoted asking price for the homes they bought although some pay more – for a variety of reasons. Our biggest saving last year was 11% of the asking price.

According to Rightmove sellers typically accepted around 5% (£11,000) less than their final asking price. Zoopla says that it’s just 3.86% and figures published by Hometrack suggest that an average buyer pays 97% of the asking price.

Over the past decade, on average our clients paid 11% (or £100,000) less!

One third of what we buy is ‘off-market’, not on websites or in estate agents’ windows.

We are not the only buying agents and it’s more important that you have the right advisor than that it necessarily be us. For a brief period of time your buying agent will have a detailed and personal knowledge of your affairs so you must trust them and have confidence in what they are doing and they in you. We are confident that we are at least as good as most firms but are not arrogant enough to think that we can be everyone’s cup of tea. Our aim is that you have the right advisor for you even if that means you are represented by someone else. These are some of the best that we recommend you speak to.

A buying agent can;-

  • Source off-market properties – those available but not advertised on websites or in agent’s windows.
  • Advise on areas, compare and contrast different places.
  • Research a street, village or town looking at crime, natural threats such as flooding and over-flights by planes.
  • Assess relative value.
  • Research the motivations of the sellers and look for pressure points like death, debt or divorce.
  • Comment on yield and the potential for capital growth.
  • Negotiate with the seller and their agent. (Not all selling agents are slippery but some certainly are!).
  • Introduce the best mortgage brokers, accountants and wealth managers along with advisors, tradesmen & lawyers.
  • Liaise with solicitors, valuers, surveyors, architects, builders and contractors.
  • Help to make your next move the smoothest and most painless experience possible.
You describe the dream, I'll find the home.
You describe the dream, I’ll help you find it.

Sometimes the best advice we give is “don’t!”. Having seen hundreds of homes over the years we can often spot a problem that would be easy to overlook.

Sometimes the best advice is 'not' to buy something
Although I don’t get paid for saying it sometimes the best advice is ‘not’ to buy something..

Buying agents are still estate agents in the eyes of the law and as such each must sign up to a redress scheme. Confusingly there are two, we were members of The Property Ombudsman for many years but this is the one that we are currently signed up to.

It’s important to stress that we are good but we’re not magicians. We can help shorten the process, help to ensure that you don’t buy the wrong thing and buy as aggressively as possible but we can’t dream up a property if one doesn’t exist. We can help to decide what might be worth compromising on and what isn’t.

112 Comments

  1. As far as we’re concerned, property buying equals the Pryors.

    The first thing to say was how generous Henry was with his time and expertise even before we formally appointed him as our search agent – we’re talking multiple phone calls with a wealth of advice. But once we decided that we’d like our hands held through the whole process and signed up the full-fat Buying Agent service, Henry and his brother Richard in particular (who was in charge of our search) were instrumental in us finding our dream home.

    It took time – years not months – and we had our fair share of frustrations, but through all of it, Richard was always there not only to provide unflagging practical help with good humour, but also to keep our minds focused on the right priorities (including gentle challenges to our assumptions when needed) and never losing sight of the big prize. And once the deal was agreed on the house, we were frankly astounded at how the Pryors’ well-oiled machine (including their superlative little black book of contacts) just took care of the process. We signed papers as and when needed, but everything else was essentially taken care of, including a whole lot of legwork on Richard’s part to find quotes for remediations which was well above and beyond anything we were expecting.

    Long story short, our new house is absolutely perfect, we can’t believe it’s ours, and we couldn’t have done it without the Pryors.

  2. Henry has been great. He was always available, providing daily assistance in getting a tricky purchase over the Line.

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