Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. Welcome to Merin Talks Your Money, the personal finance edition of Merin Talks Money. In these bonus podcasts, we talk about the best strategies for making the most of your money. I'm Merin sumst Web, Bloomberg UK Wealth Editor at Large and with me senior
reporter and author of the Money Distilled newsletter, John Steberg. Hi, John, him. So, we are rattling through this housing business right So so far we've been through the general state of UK housing. We've looked at where and how to get a mortgage broker, We've looked at shared ownership properties, etc. And we've looked at why new bills might or might not be a good thing to buy. I think we know what we
think on that. I was going to ask you what your favorite is so far, John, but actually you've been kind of outraged at every step of the way. So you haven't had a favorite. You've probably had one that's made you most angry and most upset. Which one is being so far?
I think I'm getting a reputation.
Here age John.
To be honest, I'm just a grumpy old mind. No, it's the new build one. I mean, I'd heard the turn fleecehold, and obviously I do a fair bit about leasehold, but just the extent of the kind of badness and how people are being coined basically just to just blew my mind if I'm honest, which basically means it's my favorite because I like it and angry.
Okay, So how do we avoid this kind of thing? How do we make sure that no merin talks your money. Listeners ever end up with a house that brings them nasty surprises that turns out to be a liability not an asset. Well, this podcast always has an answer, and today we have the perfect guest to talk about this, because what you actually need to make sure that your life is not destroyed by buying the wrong house at
the wrong price is a buying agent. So today we are joined by camilladel Kimilidell is managing partner and founder of Black Brick Property Solutions and has worked in the London property markets and it's two thousand and two, very experienced meeting the needs of demanding domestic and international property buyers. Welcome to the show, Camilla.
Thank you, Maren, thanks so much for having me.
Oh, it's a pleasure right, So you are a buying agent. So first two questions, One what is a buying agent? And two why do we need one?
A buying agent is a property professional that represents the interests of the buyer on a property transaction. I think the best way to think of us is the complete opposite to an estate agent. State agents are there to represent the interests of the seller. They're there to market and advertise properties for sale, and they're there to try and sell, primarily stock that they're directly instructed on as a priority, and then to try and get the highest
possible price they can for their client, being the seller. Typically, buyers have nobody represent them. I often love to use the analogy that going into the property market without a buying agent is a bit like going to court without a lawyer. You'd never dream of representing yourself. And yet when it comes to buying property, which is often one of the most significant and largest financial commitments that somebody will do in their entire lifetimes, people tend to do
that without proper representation. So the best way to describe what a buying agent does is we are professionals that are there to purely represent the interests of the buyer on a property transaction, and that's everything from helping the buyer to understand the market and identify and find the right property for them, and then help to negotiate the best possible price on their behalf and then manage and oversee the whole legal process as well.
Okay, that's fascinating, and we've talked about this John and I in the past. It is extraordinary that people go into the one financial transaction that will in many ways really set the direction of their financial life, and of their domestic life, and of their home life, of their family life, of everything. Go into this transaction that very often means they have twenty twenty five, sometimes thirty years worth of payments to make, etc. Do we know how
all this works? They go into that with absolutely nobody representing them or helping them at all, even though they may only have bought one house before or no houses before, so they know nothing about this market. And they go into effectively not fight, but come up against an a state agent or a group of state agents who have decades and decades of experience in this and do this for a living. It's an extraordinary dynamic when you think about it, like that.
Absolutely it is, you know, and I'm not quite sure how it's played out like that. Fortunately, I think things asked the tide is starting to change, and certainly in the London property market. I would say the concept of you and working with a buying agent now, if I compare today to two thousand and seven when I first set Black Brick up, yeah, I would say the concept of working with buying agents is much better known today than it was, you know, eighteen years ago.
People often think that if you are going to have a buying agent, people know a little bit about the concept, but they think this is for very very high end stuff.
You only need a buying agent if you're looking for something huge, something unique, something particularly in demand, major townhouse in Mayfair, a statelier six bedroom house in the Cotswolds, etc. But it seems to me, based on even our conversations so far, that this is something that everyone should have, right down to someone buying their first small apartment for two hundred thousand pounds, because if you get it wrong, the long term expense is always going to be higher
than the fee you might pay upfront.
Absolutely, I firmly believe that anybody buying should have a buying agent represent them. It's one of the reasons why when I originally set the firm up, we actually set on minute them to work with us quite low. We sett it at five hundred thousand pounds back in two thousand and seven. We're now at a million plus. But there are plenty of buying agents out there that are more than happy to look after buyers with much lower budgets than where we start.
When you say much lower, what do you mean if I'm looking to buy a flat for two hundred thousand pounds? Is there anybody out there who would help me?
There is. There's one individual in particular who actually started his career at Black Brick working with us, and now whenever we get inquiries below our minimum threshold, we passed them to him. He really saw, I think a bit of a gap in the market to look after buyers lower price ranges, and he's spilled his business around that. So I think there's a lot of choice out there. There's a lot of different buying agents out there. There's
not lots of them, but there are. There are a few buying agents out there that are catered to looking after clients with lower budgets.
And then there is Henry Pryor isn't it our old friend Henry Bradjohn who has something called pocket agent, which is not quite a buying agent in that you don't go out, it'll go to look for a house for you, but helps you through the searchers and negotiations, etc. And that's that can come in at one thousand pounds. So even something like that is better than nothing. Gives you, gives you value to make sure you're not going to make a webbing great mistake.
Absolutely. I think just having a sounding board somebody that's totally removed from the transaction and then it's not incentivized by selling the property give you that bird's eye view. I think it is crucial.
Yeah, and that's the key, isn't it incentive? So let's talk about some of the things that you would do for a buyer that they wouldn't get if they were using an estate agent. So things like the classics. You might be able to find houses that are not on the market yet, so get to them before the ordinary
buyer would, right. And then things like being able to figure out what you should really pay based on prices that people have paid locally or per square foot nearby, and this kind of thing looking at things that maybe an ordinary buyer wouldn't think of immediately, you know you've fallen love the house, and you don't necessarily think, well, hang on, what about the traffic flow nearby? What about the crime? What about that hotel at the end of the road, what about and in John's case, of course,
what about those flights going overhead? And that's the sort of thing that I that I think about when I think about a buying agent. Are those the main things around my missing some things in there?
We help with all of those elements. I think initially a buying agent can be quite helpful in helping you to build a brief, to kind of work out what it is that you're looking for, and then to look at can you actually afford it? Have you thought about things like getting finance? And if you haven't, then we can help recommend and put clients in touch with the right people. Have you thought about getting tax advice? Have you thought about who's going to represent you on the
legal side of the transaction. What we like to do with our clients before we start the buying journey is to make sure that they've got all of their ducks lined up in a row, because what you don't want to happen is you go down this process and sometimes it can be quite let and you end up finding your dream property and then you try and sort everything out your finances, finding a lawyer, etc. And another buy
who's more organized beats you to it. So what we like to try and do with our clients is get them really organized and thinking about all of these things before they start the search with us. And then once we've nailed their brief and we've got a good understanding of what they're looking for, we then go out into the market and represent them. And that is I would say over the last eighteen years that process of searching for clients has become more and more complicated and more
time consuming as time has gone on. In interesting statistic, if you go on to Google and type how many estate agents are there operating in London, the figure is just over seven four hundred agents. There has been an explosion of people selling properties in London over the past few years. So you know, think of your big corporate firms, your Night Franks, your A lot of great agents working for those companies over the last few years have left
and set up much smaller, tiny independent operations. Sometimes one man band's working from home. There's much more choice for people into who are selling in terms of who they want to work with. From the buyer's perspective, what that means is it's so much more difficult now to find because you can't just rely on the portals like right Move for example, I would estimate that only fifty percent
of what's available for sale are on portals. There's a whole other world of property that never makes the portals for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes it's confidentiality, Sometimes it's because the property is so great, so desirable, that it sells before it ever gets onto the portal. So you know, as a buy you cannot you can no
longer just rely on the portals. You've got to also be speaking directly to the stakeholders, to the agents who have these instructions, and lots of those instructions will not be marketed.
Okay. Interesting, So going back a tiny bit to what you were saying about getting on your duct in a row before you go and put an offer another house, is it also the case there's another benefit possibly of using a buying agent in a very competitive market is it. The agent might suggest to the sellers that they prefer a buyer that comes with the help of an agent because they know that it's a real offer, the cash is there, it will go through.
One hundred percent. This is where professional representation I think is just invaluable to buyers because you know, imagine you're a state agent. You're trying to find a buyer for a property that you're selling, and you're presented with two offers. One is from a buyer that you don't know, and then you're presented with another offer from a credible buying agent who you've got a track record with that you've transacted with on lots of other property transactions in the past.
Who are you going to recommend your client the seller on the negotiation process, not just in terms of collating all of the comparable evidence and helping to negotiate the deal, but also just the relationships that we've built over these years, and the track record means that often our offers are preferred over and above unrepresented buyers offers.
Interesting, John, I'm sorry I'm hugging the questions again, not at all.
Thanks, Thanks quite good to take tons well. What I wanted to ask you was from the I guess the perspective of people perhaps at the lower end of the market or first time buyers. So you've been doing this for over twenty years now, so you must know a lot about buying properties. So let's say I'm not quite at the stage where I'm able to employ a buying agent yet, or I'm too worried about the amount after
reason for my deposit is. Then you would say to an amateur buyer, if you like that, the what's your maybe your top three tips? What are the things that normal people focus on that they are mistakenly focusing on, and what should they be paying much more attention into whenever they're buying a house. I'm looking for the host.
The first thing is get your docks in a row. I've said that already, but I can't emphasize the importance of that, because if you're not organized, if you don't know how you're going to buy the property, none of the agents are going to take you seriously. They're not going to want to take your own viewings, they're not going to take your offers seriously. So I think making sure that you've got your docks lined up in a row and I think this was on a previous episode
on this series. Not taking the recommendation of the state agent when it comes to financing, when it comes to solicitors, when it comes to surveyors, always make sure that you are just independently finding your own advisors on the transaction and you're not using the preferred broker or solicitor of the agent that you're trying to buy the house. Film that's really important, I think in terms of my other top tips for people embarking on this process is don't
just be driven by the deal. I think often a lot of clients come to me and the first thing they say is they want a deal, they want to bargain, And I say, look what you trying to achieve here. You know you're trying to buy a forever family home. The most important thing is that this is a property that is going to work for you and your family for the foreseeable And I think when you look at the associated costs of buying today, they are so high.
Stamp duty rates have never been higher, so the stakes have never been higher. You cannot afford to get this decision wrong. And whatever you end up buying needs to serve you for the long term. I think we're seeing buyers now take fewer jumps up the property ladder and make fewer moves, And so when you are moving, that's got to be your home for the next ten years or longer. So don't focus on the wrong things. Don't
focus on is it cheap? Is it a deal? Focus on is this right for me and my family for the long term. Often I see buyers just get so totally sidetracked with whether it's a good deal or not when they're trying to buy a family home. I think other good top tips are make sure that you walk the neighborhood at different times of the day, look at how things change during peak traffic periods, have a really good look at who the neighbors are, have a look
at what your commute looks like from the property. If you've got children involved, what does that journey look like for the kids to school. Just looking at the practical elements and then actually physically going and doing them to see how it all works, I think is really really useful as well.
Getting down to the kind of grim practicalities of money, because I know that obviously whenever you're I can allan kind a buyer negotiating with the sale out of the state agent always feels like quite a fraught process from a professional point of view, What would you see at the kind of best things to do, as you know, can alan buyer if it comes to try and make an offer that perhaps is lawer than the asking place.
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing that you need to do as a buyer is understand is the asking price realistic. What we do as buying agents is we look at that asking price, and we look at at price square foot, and then we look at we try and find as many comparable sales that we can of similar properties that have sold recently and look at what they achieved on a price per square foot basis.
That will give you a really good understanding of whether this asking price is realistic or whether it's sky high and back in two thousand and two territory. So that's always a good basis. I think for mortgage buyers the end of the day, what we say to a state agent's you know, if we're putting in offers that are significantly below the asking price based on evidence, is look, you know, you need to feed this back to your seller. You need to make them aware of the evidence of
things that are happening in the market. We're not putting this offer forward because we're trying to be cheeky or we're trying to do a deal. We've put this offer forward.
It's very carefully considered, it's based on market evidence, and because the buyer is taking funuts, there's going to be a bank valuation anyway, so it's pointless to get a deal agreed at an inflated price that will then just fall out of bed when the valuer comes along for the bank and values it and it's a lower value than the agreed purchase price, and everybody gets upset at
that point, and then the deal doesn't go through. Look a good A state agent will be having these conversations with their sellers already, and I think in the current market we are seeing much more realistic pricing. As buying agents, when we see properties that are on the market for very inflated levels before suggesting one of our clients comes and has a look at it, we'll have a conversation with that a state agent saying, look, is this just
wishful thinking? Are they serious sellers? Because an unrealistic selling price, particularly in the current market, suggests that the seller is just not serious about selling, and we don't want to waste our client's time taking them to see properties and getting them excited about something when the seller is just not really that serious or motivated. I think also understanding the motivation of the seller is really important in the negotiation strategy and the psychology of it. We always like
to understand the seller's situation. Why are they selling, what's the reason? How all they own the property, what did they buy it for? Do they have a mortgage on it? So really understanding that whole background as well, I think is important to help with the negotiation process.
It's interesting, isn't it how having a buying agent can take some of the emotion out of that, because negotiating directly is really hard and John's right that, you know, sellers in particular can get really upset if the house that they love is not valued by buyers in the way that it feel it should be. Shout out to the person we bought our house from, who took out all the shelves, all the titles, and every single light.
We always like to sort of, haven't you know, put a little bit of a bio in with our offer? Letters as well, because I think it is emotional and I think if you are buying from somebody and it's been the family home for many, many years, you know, So we loved on our offer letters a bit about our clients. Our clives are looking for there forra a home. They really love your property, They can see themselves living there for the next you know, ten years or plus.
Giving the seller some information about yourself as the buyer and why you like their property, I think can often soften the blow if it's a slightly lower bid as well.
Who does our buying agent's fee typically work?
So most buying agents tend to work on a similar ish model. You know. We charge clients and initial registration fee to make sure that they're serious about working with us and to start the relationship, and then on success, we charge whatever works out to be the greater of either two point five percent of the purchase price or twenty percent of what we managed to save our client from the asking price as a result of our negotiations
on their behalf. So that's what we charge. I think there are, as I said, there's lots of buying agents out there catering to all sorts of different budgets. So you will find a range of fees out.
There, and you'll find that there are a few fixed fee arrangements, are there?
Some do fixed fee? I mean for us, you know, once we start to sort of you know, get into the kind of twenty thirty forty million pound budgets, some of our clients we might agree with some sort of fixed fee on those kinds of searches. We're flexible. We never want fees to get in the way of working with really great clients. That's kind of very much our ethos at Black Brick.
But I love the idea of charging based on how much you save. No one can argue with the value there can I. Kimilla, thank you so much for coming on today.
That was good. Thanks Camela, thank.
You thanks for listening to this week's Maren Talks Your Money. If you like our show, rate review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also be short follow me and John on x or Twitter at marinas w and John Underscore Steppic. This episode was produced by Moses and and Samasadi. Sound designed by Blake Maple's Special thanks to Camilla Dell questions and comments on the show and all Our shows are always welcome. Our show email is merin Money at blmberg dot net