Press Article
LONDON LITE Wednesday 25 April, 2007
Why I hired a househunter
Use your own Phil and Kirstie to take out all the stress and effort of finding and buying your perfect property…
By Jessie Hewitson
BUYING a property is enough to turn even the sanest, most even-tempered among us into quivering stress-buckets. If you have a smug lawyer or surveyor as a partner, you can probably leave all the dirty business of finding somewhere decent and playing hardball over the price to them. But for most of us lesser mortals, the whole process of choosing and negotiating over a flat or house is, quite frankly, hellish. Aside from anything else, who has the time to call all those estate agents and visit endless nasty little flats you wouldn’t dream of wasting your hard-earned deposit on?
Fear not, though, help is at hand. What you need is your very own Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp. The presenters of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location are buying agents in real life as well as on television. Phil set up his buying agency, Garrington, a decade ago. It helps people decide where to live, talks to estate agents, tells the buyer which properties are worth looking at and even negotiates the price.
Previously, buying agents such as Phil and Kirstie have catered almost exclusively for the top end of the market, but now some agents are beginning to help those with more modest bank balances as well. Of course, buying agents come at a cost. Expect to pay a registration fee of It might seem like a big outlay, but it does mean that in the highly competitive London property market you will get the property you want for the right price.
Rebecca Rollin, 27, an account manager for a marketing company, is a first-time buyer who used the services of Jo Eccles to buy her £245,000 one-bedroom flat in Clapham South. Jo, of Sourcing Property (020 7244 4485, www.sourcing property.co.uk), has no limit on how small a budget she’ll deal with and is just as likely to be finding property for bankers with salaries as long as their phone numbers as she is for a first-time buyer whose wage is perhaps more the length of a postcode. She charges a registration fee of £500 and one per cent of the sale price, plus VAT.Rebecca says she was worth every penny because her flat is “perfect”. “I decided to use a buying agent as, when I tried to find a flat on my own, I’d turn up to viewings and find there were six other couples there,” she says.
"As a first-time buyer I felt I needed a bit of hand-holding. I had quite a lot of problems with my solicitor and I didn’t have the time at work to keep pushing and make calls, so I was very grateful to have a buying agent who could do this for me.”
She adds: “The flat is exactly what I wanted. My main criteria were that I wanted to be safe and have a short journey from the Tube. Jo made sure I got somewhere that wasn’t on the ground floor. “From speaking to me, she knew exactly what I wanted. I can’t do DIY, for example, so I needed everything ready. I also wanted outside space and she managed to find a flat with a roof terrace.
“Before I used a buying agent I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted to live in north or south London. This meant I was signed up with every estate agent going and spending my weekends traipsing round flats, but getting nowhere. I must have seen more than 20 properties this way. When I spoke to Jo, we focused on what I really wanted and what was realistic in my price bracket. She then made sure that when there was a property that was right for me I would be the first person to see it. When she found the property I ended up buying, she phoned me and said, ‘You have to come now!’
"I got there and made an offer at the same time there was a couple on the Tube on their way to put a deposit down. I would never have got it without Jo.”
Jo says: “People with smaller budgets are always pleasantly surprised that we can help them and that we won’t laugh them out of the door when they tell us how much they want to spend. With a drastic shortage in properties at the moment it’s a really competitive market. Buyers need that competitive edge and so they are looking to us to provide that.”
Tracy Kellett, of BDI Home Finders is another buying agent who has become involved in the lower end of the market. The minimum budget she’ll work with is £250,000. She charges a retainer of £1,500 and 1.5 per cent, plus VAT. She says: “Most people see one or two properties every Saturday and get nowhere. With us, on the first day we’ll show between eight and 14 and will often see the property for them on that first day.”
Tracy says buyers can no longer expect to pay less than the asking price, which some of her clients find hard to accept. “You can’t afford to hang about hoping you’ll get some sort of discount which you want on principle,” she says. “You have to accept that you will pay the full asking price, even if it goes against the grain.”
Jo agrees. “At the moment the asking price is the starting price,” she says. “Lots of properties are going for way over the asking price, too. “Where we add value is by making sure we get the client in to see the property straightaway, so it’s taken off the market as soon as possible.“This means you avoid the situation where the price is driven up by having other buyers bidding against you.”