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.
We recently sold a house to Henry’s clients near to Guildford. Henry guided them through the whole process resulting in a very smooth and pain free transaction.
I worked with Rosie recently and it was an absolute pleasure. She was very easy to deal with it and did very well to help her clients exchange. She was always responsive and did well to manage the expectations. I would definitely recommend any buyer to use her and I’m looking forward to our next encounter!
Rosie was a pleasure to work with during her efforts to assist her clients in the acquisition of a home near Kew Gardens. She’s on-the-ball, responsive, courteous and polite, quite rare in the world we live in today. As the Agent selling the home, I was taking care of my clients (all 4 of them) and managing expectations throughout the process whilst Rosie was taking care of her purchasers in a seamless fashion. It’s great to know, on completion, all clients and purchasers were extremely happy! Well done, Rosie! Danny Hicks, Head of Sales, Chase Buchanan, Richmond & Kew.
Working with Henry and Kate was an absolute pleasure, they were extremely easy to deal with through the whole process and very knowledgeable. I would recommend any buyer to them and guarantee you will not be disappointed as their service is second to none. I look forward to working with you again in the future.
We contacted Henry in July 2020 to help out with our house search in what were unprecedented times. We had started looking for a home a month prior to the first national lockdown and decided to find a buying agent on the basis of a recommendation from a friend.
Henry and Rosie were very patient in what turned out to be a long and drawn out search in a very tricky market. They managed to keep us motivated and grounded as we received multiple knock backs and, at times, felt like throwing the towel in. They were always very honest and knowledgable with feedback regarding properties and keen to get us the best property that we could afford.
When we finally had an offer accepted, Rosie was fantastic at ensuring the purchase went relatively smoothly.
I would recommend them both wholeheartedly.
We were recommended Henry’s services by a close friend who had used him the previous year. His knowledge and professionalism shone through immediately and really helped inform us what we needed to do to sell our home and buy the next one.
We didn’t have a firm location in mind – not necessarily knowing what we could afford in a seller’s market. Henry and Rosie listened to our needs (and helped us decide what they were!), showed us a few indicative properties and we fell in love with their recommended location.
We can’t overstate how refreshing it was to have an agent looking after our interests as buyers. It was particularly valuable to have Team Pryor with us when we went to sealed bids and I strongly believe that being “approved” clients of theirs played a huge part in us securing our new home!
We reached out to Henry initially because we had no idea where we were headed, and as a national agent of some repute, we thought that he might have insights and access more widely than a local agent. We were really struggling as to destination, and our brief was horribly wide. In a market (H12021) which was itself stressed (nearly no supply, and huge competition from London lockdown escapees looking for large plots in rural settings from where they could “wfh”), we had sold with a long completion but were marooned with nowhere to go. A further complication was our requirement for a decent in-law-annexe, since new-world “lost the children but inherited parents” syndrome was upon us.
My wife was spending upwards of 5 hours each day on Rightmove chasing shadows. If she spotted a decent prospect it was really hard to reach the agent and often enough all available viewing slots were taken or the property had already sold and the agent was just using RM to advertise how successful they were. Very annoying.
So many properties, so many opportunities, but so many of them contained faults and non-disclosures (OMG the major A-Road 100m from frontage, the “oh we sold off the barns overlooking the garden”, the pylons in the garden).
Our first session with Henry was brilliant. With a perfunctory nod to COVID distancing, he set about the task with enthusiasm. To say we were beguiled is an understatement. His clear presentation of the housing market and explanation of sale and purchase processes, tricks of the trade, non-emotional evaluation of pros and cons, was transformational. It’s a market. Vendor agents are paid to sell their properties, prices and specs are “fluid”. Buyer must abandon emotions and transact as if it is a major financial deal, which of course it is.
The flow of pithy anecdotes (admittedly I’ve heard a few on his podcasts so I suspect once coined, they become part of the repertoire) underscored the messaging, and his dry wit softened the more pointed teaching. He introduced us to the concept of “snow blindness” and demanded that we take a break from the dreaded RM, and prohibited us from viewing any properties that he had not approved.
The market got hotter and hotter, supply tightened further, and we leaned on Henry for support. Marriage guidance part of the package. He remained supportive, encouraging in the face of a bonkers market, and perhaps the most important attribute, he’s an anchor when storms of uncertainty and “would’ve could’ve should’ve” recriminations abound.
So, after 6 months, where did we end up? We are very happily ensconced in an old barn in Nottinghamshire close enough to the in-laws to provide daily support to them. We didn’t find the perfect house in Norfolk or Suffolk with an annexe into which we could decant them. Weirdly we found them in more need of care than we had anticipated, so that would have been a better solution. Message to others : go spend three weeks with the oldies to evaluate how exactly they are buggering along. Some surprises out there.
And Henry Pryor? Well. We had him looking in so many directions at once (OMG my wife dragged me out to see a property in Malmesbury, while poor Henry was directed to watch Suffolk coasts). He helped us bid on a lovely house in Norfolk, promoting our candidature amongst competing bids, but we pulled out on a covenant issue. Then he supported our best-and-final submission on the Suffolk coast, cautioning us against over-paying in a frothy market. The fact that we found the Notts destination while visiting the in-laws is no criticism of Henry’s truffle-hunting prowess. When we saw the house and felt it was right, Henry was the perfect foil probing for any signs that we were compromising out of desperation, and managing the bidding process for us.
So yes, we heartily recommend the Henry. We will never approach the market again without his support.
Henry helped us find a great house in an impossible market. He was recommended to us, and he did a brilliant job. Henry helped us through the nuances of both selling our existing house and buying our new house, and his experience and understanding of the market and processes involved in buying and selling was invaluable to us. Henry always speaks his mind, even when it is advice that his clients might not want to hear – which is important when trying to make the right decisions. We enjoyed his enthusiastic approach, littered with dry humour, and availability at any time, which made a difficult process much more fun and much less stressful. We would really recommend Henry!
I sought Henry’s assistance for a house purchase which was proving tricky on many counts. Henry is a patient, highly knowledgeable, well informed friend, confidant, counsellor and guide. Not only did he facilitate alternative options, he was there throughout in helping us finally complete the deal on our original choice. I would highly recommend Henry – get him on your side sooner rather than later!
Relocating from Hong Kong to London during COVID was never going to be easy and we were on a mission to purchase a family home within a year of touching down. We had no idea how to navigate the UK property market so when a friend recommended Henry, we decided to engage.
It’s very difficult to put into a few words our experience of working with Henry. Henry quickly understood who we are as a family and what we were looking for in a home. We would have been utterly lost without his expertise. We used all of his contacts for the legal, surveyor and insurance side of things and we found them all to be incredibly helpful and committed to getting things done quickly.
We thoroughly enjoyed working with Henry – we know he must have had countless stressful phone calls on our part but he removed us from that part of the process. He came to us with solutions before we even knew there was an issue.
We can’t recommend him highly enough and really hope to use his services again in the future. Thank you Henry!