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 invaluable for us to buy our final home. Thanks to him all the emotions arising when you buy a house are managed effectively and will have zero influence on your negotiating position with the seller. He also listens to you and in fact he may know what is right for you before you know it. The sale agreement has been very smooth and we did not speak to an estate agent once. The offer was made on a Monday and on Thursday evening we got a call from Henry we had a deal. He managed the whole negotiation process and he won against a cash buyer. His contacts and knowledge on negotiation are unique and if we ever buy anything again in the UK we will contact him with no doubt !
Henry was exceptionally generous with his time and expertise and didn’t rest until we were sorted – even though it took us a long time and we had paid him up front. We are now in a wonderful place after a very smooth move and there’s no way it would have been of conceivable without Henry and Rosie making it happen. We would come to him again in a heartbeat: a total no-brainier to employ him again should we ever have to leave our dreamy new house. Thank you Henry, thank you Rosie. X
Notwhistanding that Henry always sided with my wife during our search for a new home, he could not have been a better ally in a very tricky market.
We could not have done it without Henry and if we ever have to buy or sell a house again he will be the first person I call.
Henry has been fantastic from start to finish in our process. We contacted him after losing out on our dream house. Within a matter of weeks we had agreed a deal on another dream house next door to the first one! Henry’s advice was absolutely invaluable in helping us to secure the second property. In addition, he has been excellent at dealing with the agents and keeping us calm and rational during a process which took longer than we had hoped. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him to anyone.
When we first contacted Henry, we had almost no idea what we needed and where. Two foreigners, we had little understanding of how the market functioned, what was worth looking at and what wasn’t. We were swinging back and forth between building a house, buying a house, buying a flat, etc.
One year later, we live in a house we love, in the street we enjoy.
It didn’t come from an off-market list, I found it myself on Rightmove (I think Henry has shown us only one off-market house in twelve months). We didn’t pay 11% less than the final asking price. Our negotiations with the sellers initially went awry, and our offer was rejected, despite our bid being higher and the other buyer being in a chain. I believe, it happened partly because of the sellers’ explosive temperaments, partly because they didn’t want to sell to foreigners, partly because of the negotiation tactics that annoyed them.
Was the bespoke buying service still worth it? Yes, absolutely. I think, without Henry, we could have easily bought something we’d regret (if you google the stats, over half of buyers do). Several times he talked us out of the wrong houses in the wrong areas. He introduced us to a good conveyancer and a knowledgeable surveyor. He spent hours on the phone with the sellers talking them off the edge — and shielded us from all the drama. He helped us keep a cool head, too.
His support was invaluable; you need an ally like him when the stakes are that high.
We don’t want to move ever again, but if we do, we will call Henry.
My wife and I decided upfront that we wanted a buying agent to advise us on our home purchase to avoid first time purchase mistakes. We found Henry by Googling! He was brilliant advising on how best to secure the home in a competitive situation. I liked his honest opinion but most importantly, he educated us on how to negotiate and close on our first home in a very aggressive time period. I don’t think I’ll ever buy a home without a buying agent by my side and I certainly would work with Henry again. He’s also got a great sense of humour!
As first-time buyers we found Henry’s contacts, experience and knowledge incredibly helpful. He is refreshingly frank with his advice and was never overly-delicate in highlighting issues with certain areas or properties that we may otherwise have missed. Henry’s daughter Rosie also played a hand in helping us secure our new home and we really appreciated her documenting every inch of the properties we didn’t have time to see. In terms of the contacts Henry was able to provide, we would highly recommend Dee Aylward over at Laytons LLP whose legal services proved invaluable.
My girlfriend and I were searching the property market for months and were outbid several times on properties we liked during the post-lockdown boom in house-hunting. We were starting to lose hope that we would ever find a property to fall in love with.
Luckily, I took the plunge and reached out to Henry to ask for his advice. We ended up enlisting him as our buying agent after a couple of calls together. It gave us tremendous peace of mind to have someone with his expertise telling us whether properties were correctly valued and working with him was a delight.
Almost immediately, his efficient daughter, Rosie, had found us an amazing property in our ideal area and we decided to buy it on our first viewing.
We thought it might have been a mistake to have enlisted Henry when we found a property so quickly. Really though, his help was just beginning, He guided us through the whole process, recommended lawyers, surveyors and specialists and was always on call to help us at any hour.
We were very happy with his services and I wouldn’t think twice about working with him again. He just gets the job done.
Watch out for the terrible dad jokes though!
We were apprehensive about going down the buying agent route before we appointed Henry but after our first meeting we knew we’d made the right choice. Now after countless phone calls, emails and WhatsApp’s all around the clock for several months we’re sitting in our dream home and it literally wouldn’t have happened without Henry’s dedication, relentless hard work, invaluable expertise and experience and we couldn’t be more sure with our decision.
Henry is not afraid to speak bluntly with his opinions which is exactly what we needed but most importantly even when we disagreed he was also extremely effective in fighting our corner and taking the brunt away from us for the good of the transaction and for our needs.
We would 100% recommend using Henry as a buying agent. Not only did Henry lighten the work load and anxiety of buying a home, he made it a fun and rewarding experience and unlocked possibilities we simply would not have imagined in our own.
Henry took the time to really understand our needs and educate us on the marketplace to give us a true picture of what was and wasn’t reasonable to expect for our budget and search area. He made introductions to a wonderful solicitor and surveyor and oversaw the entire negotiation and exchange process, saving us considerably more than his fee, and ensuring it went smoothly. Having just exchanged contracts on a beautiful house in Chiswick just 46 days after instructing him, we can’t imagine going though this process again without Henry’s help and guidance.