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Buying a home is the largest investment most people make in a lifetime. It is also likely to represent a significant change in lifestyle that will impact upon a decade or more of one’s family life.
A homesearch agent can advise and assist with the buying process and help access the unseen property market: those houses that are bought before their details are placed on the Internet or into the advertising pages of a magazine or newspaper.
However, a bewildering number of companies that claim to act for the buyer have been set up in response to demand - there are now at least 60 trading in various locations across the country. Selecting the right agency can be difficult and a poor choice may well have a dramatic effect upon the quality of properties that are presented.
We have put together a brief guide that aims to help those considering the use of a Buying Agent to select the agency that will respond best to their individual set of circumstances:
Expertise » Independence » Service » Competition » Evidence » Final Note
Expertise:
The agency should be able to demonstrate expertise and experience in the type of property that the buyer is looking for. One that claims to serve all markets, buying anything from £300,000 cottages to £9 million estates, might be avoided.
Independence:
A buyer must be absolutely sure that, when their buying agent recommends a house, he or she is doing so because it is genuinely felt that it is the right house for their client. There must be no possibility that a recommendation could originate from a need to meet internal directives that stem from an associated company. Arguably, only independent agencies can guarantee that level of transparency.
Service:
Searching for a home is a demanding and time consuming process and an agency that has more clients than its infrastructure can deal with should be avoided. The client to agent ratio will illustrate whether this is the case: an agency that has 20 agents but 300 clients has a client to agent ratio of 15; one with 3 agents and 12 clients has a ratio of 4. One might reasonably expect a better service from the agency with the lower ratio.
Competition:
If an agency is managing a large number of clients at any one time there will be a strong possibility that two or more of those clients will be looking for the same type of home. If this is the case, those clients will have to compete for the right house when it is found. This competition between clients would appear to degrade the advantage that the use of a buying agent offers and a buyer might reasonably question the value that that agency could offer.
Evidence:
Most buying agencies claim to save their clients money and find off-market properties. When listening to facts and figures quoted by these agencies, it is often worth remembering that it is very rare to negotiate savings on an off-market property. In our experience, attempts to do so are normally met with a polite, “no, we’ll take our chances with the market”. Therefore, if an agency claims to have bought a high number of off-market properties and made a high number of savings for their clients, you should examine the evidence that supports these claims minutely in order to verify their accuracy.
And a final note about Estate Agents’ buying departments:
A number of well known estate agencies have set up formal buying departments in response to an increased demand for the service. Examples of such departments are Knight Frank who own The Buying Solution and Savills who own Prime Purchase. There can be no doubt that they have the necessary expertise and experience and, initially, their appearance in the market worried us; after all, they have direct access to a huge number of applicants who might be approached as potential clients. Therefore, we researched these companies, and in so doing, asked some of the other better placed agencies how they respond to approaches from these subsidiaries.
The answer was clear: we were told that that they would deal with the buying departments but, despite assurances, they would not give early warning about properties coming to market in case the news leaked to selling side of that business. Our conclusion was that the estate agents’ buying departments would provide good advice but it is unlikely that they could give early warning about properties coming to market unless that information comes from their parent company. In that instance, the client would need to be comfortable with a situation where the parent company advises the vendor while the subsidiary advises them. Our clients do not think that situation offers them the most viable opportunity to secure the best property.