All the help you need to prepare, search, evaluate, bid, secure and get moved into your next home.
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.
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.
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.
Henry has been incredibly helpful as I’ve floundered about trying to buy and sell in a tricky market. He is extremely communicative, generous with his time and advice and has been a sage and steady point of reference. Not only is his knowledge and experience of property second to none, but his ability to play the role of Property Agony Uncle at the end of the phone when things have seemed bleak has been extremely reassuring.
I engaged with Henry on social media following his post about “accidental landlords” in Feb 2018. Henry and I spoke following that and his sound advice and guidance gave us the confidence to market our property and successfully sell in less than a month. Very knowledgeable (as you would expect) but also engaging. I would thoroughly recommend Henry’s services.
Exhausting, exasperating and grueling, that is the feeling of trying to purchase a house in London today; the shady real estate agents and the spoiled sellers. Add a mix dirty money, enormous hikes in stamp duty taxes, and, during recent years, a macro environment with Brexit on the horizon.
You will need Henry to avoid complete and utter insanity that is all I can say. With his help we found the most amazing house of our dreams although in the end however, we did not complete the purchase.
Henry got us a great mortgage broker and and we got a mortgage offer that I did not even think was possible. He also negotiated the deal and set us up with a great straight-shooting solicitor.
However, during the searches, issue upon issue was discovered with the house. The seller’s un-helpfulness eventually make us quit the process, even though Henry went to great length to sort them all out. Lesson for the seller: it takes two to tango.
Currently we have no energy left and still no house. We will put a break on our search and reach out to Henry when we have gotten our strength back. If Henry would not have been acting on our behalf during the process it would have been a complete ride of pure insanity.
Now, we will just sit tight for a year or so, in a rental, to recover, and when we have the energy back, hopefully we can deal with a seller that actually wants our business.
We came to Henry to help us buy a family home and navigate the waters of UK housing market. He was very patient and helped us through the entire process of selecting an area, identifying the right house and negotiating the best price. He is worth his weight in gold and more than made up for his fees.
The market was especially choppy and he helped us steal a great deal due to his patience, perseverance and insights into the UK housing market.
Highly recommended you can’t go wrong in choosing Henry. We would miss his sense of humour.
Within a short number of months after first meeting Henry, I was able to secure a fantastic country home that met or exceeded all my requirements and expectations. As time poor as I am, and with my main home remote from the area in which I was interested, without Henry’s involvement, this process could have taken years or, indeed, may never have happened. I was acutely aware of my lack of knowledge of the country property market in my target area and might not have had the confidence to pull the trigger on a purchase without Henry to provide advice and perspective on the market. Once the desired property was identified, Henry handled the negotiation process extremely well.
In my case, Henry was also able to offer local knowledge and contacts to help me get the property up and running after purchase. This “after-care” was an unexpected bonus that has proved at least as valuable as his buying agent services.
The decision to work with Henry was definitely the right one and I enthusiastically recommend him.
Henry not only helps you find the house that you are looking for, but also helps you zero in on the area that you should be looking at. He helped us a lot with understanding different areas, builds, and what makes a property or area more desirable than the other. Once we had the house decided, he helped us negotiate a great deal, all the while explaining his process. He was there to make sure things were in order and moving at a good pace once the offer was accepted. He was always available on call or email, and would get back promptly on any queries or questions we had. We never felt the stress of buying a house, and it actually turned out to be quite an enjoyable process.
We would recommend him in a heart beat.
Henry came highly recommended and as we dipped our toe into the terrifying world of moving out of London and juggling buy-to-lets we gave him a call. Always calm, he led us by the hand through this minefield. His advice was brilliant, and whilst not always what we wanted to hear allowed us to assess the situation with our eyes wide open. We used him again to help us negotiate a deal on the house of our dreams and despite the vendor having other offers he helped us buy it at below asking price and within a matter of days. He speaks fluent ‘estate agent’ and took a huge amount of stress off our shoulders. Would highly recommend!
It is very clear to us that without your help we should not have achieved our objective, since the property we purchased was not on the market and we had no access to it. On the way, you have also relieved us of a great deal of anxiety by your constantly optimistic approach during a process which has been in some ways unnecessarily protracted.
Once we had contacted you, it rapidly became clear that you were able to facilitate the process immeasurably.
With our thanks and best wishes.
What I like about Henry is his depth of knowledge and his realistic approach. He listens with a very open mind and then gives his professional opinion. We had outgrown our large Victorian house and were very confused as what our next step should be. I work in a very busy environment and therefore it was really important to me that I had someone who I could trust and who was on my side. He understood both the business of selling and buying and gave me unbiased advice on agents, their fees, solicitors – all of which was truly useful.
His knowledge of the housing market is second to none.
I’ve worked with Henry on a number of different projects in the real estate arena. He has a fantastic depth of expertise within property and is well connected and talks in a no nonsense way. And it was refreshing to deal with someone who had no conflict of interest.
I’d thoroughly recommend him for any advice on property especially regarding residential purchase, searches or investments – and to cap it all, he also has a sense of humour