So, welcome to what is going to be an irregular um series of me having chat with people I really know, like, and trust in the industry. And today, I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Daniel Clark of Home Buyer Agency. Hello, Daniel. Hi, Simon. Thanks for having me. Thanks. You actually are guinea pig. So, this could go horribly wrong, but it's basically it's all my fault, so don't feel under any pressure at all. But you kind of your business it sort of does what it says on the tin. So you got to tell me what is a home buying agent? Well, look, we know what an estate agent is, right? Um, you know, if you want to sell a property, you call an estate agent. But in the UK, what we don't do is call an agent to act in our best interest if we want to buy a property. And that in a nutshell is what a buying agent is. So, it's an independent advisor that acts in your best interest. Just as the estate agent does for the seller, the buying agent does it for the buyer. Okay. Um, and this isn't that big in the UK is as a concept. No. So, if you were buying a home in the US or in Australia, for example, then the first thing that you'd probably do is call an agent to act in your interest. That would be the equivalent of a buying agent. But in the UK, it's not necessarily what you would do. uh most buyers go it alone. About 1% of buyers are represented by a traditional buying agent whereas 95% of sellers are represented by an estate agent. So there's quite a gap there. There's quite an opportunity there also. Um but there's a need for awareness. So of you were an estate agent, weren't you? That's why your kind of background is in estate agency. Okay. So what led you to specialize in representing buyers? Because it's not a developed market. So you're taking a bit of a risk by going out there by actually being a new emerging space and how does that kind of shape your approach? What's the difference between an estate agent and a buying agent? Well, I think that's what excites me to be honest. Um the fact that there is this gaping big hole in the market that nobody's really representing all of these buyers. I mean there are four times more buyers than there are sellers, but yet there are 25,000 plus estate agents chasing after all of the same sellers. Nobody's really out there representing the buyers. And I guess I looked at that as an opportunity and I thought, you know what, there's a lot of value that I can add here. I've acted for buyers for about six years. So, it's not like this is a new thing. But historically, I've acted for sellers and I've acted for buyers. Whereas now, I'm focusing my efforts on not only just acting for buyers, but also that that educational piece because culturally, we don't think I'm going to call a buying agent when I want to buy a property. And I want to change that. I want to make it as accessible as possible so that people do think, okay, I want to buy a property. I want to make sure that I get the best price and terms. I want to get access to properties that I might not be able to get myself. You know, I want somebody that's acting in my corner because that's not, you know, traditionally how we do it in the UK. So that's kind of what got me to focus on being a buying agent was the monumental task at hand. But the opportunity to, you know, another part of it is, let's be honest, I mean, I've been an estate agent, but estate agents are not very wellliked, are they? Let's be honest. Right. So they're not very well trusted either. Right. Exactly. I won't have it said that many of them are my best friends. Yeah, absolutely. And we we like them as friends, but not as professionals, right? And that's the that's the issue. So I think coming into acting for buyers there's an opportunity to kind of you know get that right from the offset. I think estate agents have been tred with the same brush and there are excellent excellent estate agents out there that are being tred with with with the same brush but that hasn't necessarily been done in the buying agency space. So there's an opportunity here to set correct expectations, add value, build trust, do it the right way, keep it going the right way. And all of this just spells opportunity. Curve ball question. You know, you mentioned the great 4:1 ratio of buyers to sellers. Twothirds of those buyers are also sellers. So, are you not tempted when you have a conversation with them to help them sell their property and be an estate agent? So, historically, yes. But I also think that we need to improve on collaboration um as an industry. And I think that there's a enormous opportunity there to refer people that focus on selling properties. you know, if if there are excellent estate agents out there, just like there are excellent buying agents out there, I don't need to sell their property. I can help them with choosing the right agent and work with them, supporting them on that journey and advising them on that journey. But we could work with the right estate agents to do that. So, the recommendation piece is also an important part of it. Your buying and selling is just a part of your journey to to buy a property, part of that need. So if there's a prerequisite to sell your property to get that money out to buy another one, you need to work with the right professionals in order to make that happen. But Daniel Daniel, if I want to buy a property, I just look on right move, don't I? Yeah, you could look on right move. And I think right move has about 80 85% of properties that are on the portals if you like. But you're limiting yourself to the portals, aren't you? So a lot of buyers and the majority of buyers will just look on a portal or they might look on a couple of portals and nine times out of 10 that's going to be right move or zupller or maybe both. But what about on the market? What about prime location? What about other platforms like Invisible Homes and they won't have access to, you know, networks like Lonres for example that are more offmarket, more agent exclusive, but there's a huge number of properties on there that the average buyer doesn't have access to. So there are a whole host of different avenues. There's I mean there's Facebook Marketplace, there's Gubree, there's it's funny, but there's a lot of different platforms. There's a lot of different sources and not all properties are in one place. So, working with somebody that knows where to go and then also, you know, what else do you do aside from the platforms? You could, you know, communicate with a network of agents in the area that you want to buy in. Get access to properties that haven't come to market yet before they come to market. Get your foot through the door first. You can also do a outreach program to home buy home sellers in the area that haven't come to market yet. You know, I quite often send letters out as a part of a retained search with specific details around what my client's looking for. And I will quite clearly state on that letter that I'm retained by the buyer. So, if you decide to sell, there'll be no estate agency fees for you to pay. And so, from their point of view, they're like, "Oh, I've got an opportunity here. I don't have to get my house ready to to market. I don't have to have loads of people traing through my house. I don't have all of the inconvenience of having to do all of these viewings around my life and interviewing numerous estate agents. I could just sell it quickly and easily and so they will pick up the phone and they'll call me and that opens up the opportunity to my clients to get into properties that they wouldn't otherwise get into. So long-winded answer to your question, but there's numerous different avenues. It's great. It's a great I'm thinking I should have engaged a buying house when a buying agent when I was buying a house. Um too late but we know next time. Um so you know you are embracing one of the problem areas certainly by representing buyers is there's obviously a discrepancy between market price and mortgage valuations. Yes. How are you handling that kind of tension? Well I think what quite often happens is when a buyer is negotiating it themselves they get drawn into like the emotional aspect of it and estate agents want you to. So they will do things like an offer is in excess of get as many people through the door as they can and then they'll look to drive the price up through getting competition multiple offers working the price up through emotion. Um what I think you need to do as a buying agent is remove that emotional element of it. Go away and look at the comparables. So what other properties like this one are selling in the area within the last kind of 12 to 18 months. So similar kind of size, similar kind of period, you know, these kind of the these kind of, you know, properties that are the same. What are they selling for? Because ultimately surveyors are going to factor that into their decision- making as well when they're valuing on behalf of a bank. So, you know, I did a post recently, you know, a home is worth what a buyer's willing to pay so long as they can actually complete the sale, right? There's a that saying that a home is worth what a buyer is willing to pay. Not necessarily because if the bank isn't going to lend you the money, then you can pluck numbers out of the sky, you're never going to complete that purchase. Right. So, so that kind of that kind of actually you're leaning to the next question I want to ask and I want to make sure we capture this one is how do you balance it's so emotional buying or selling a property. Yeah. You know, it's often it is most people's most expensive asset. Yeah. So, how do you get do you succeed? How do you what's your way of balancing emotion and analysis in this process? I mean, you've touched on it there. I'd like you to really get into that because that to me, it comes down to it comes down to the data, doesn't it? And I think that the buyers need to have the right information so that they can make informed decisions. Are they knowingly overpaying for a property? Some people decide to do that, but majority of people unknowingly overpay for properties, and they wouldn't do that if they knew that was the case. And so it's really about giving giving them access to the right level of information. So if you're doing a market analysis and you're looking at what the other properties in the area are selling for, you can advise them based on what the other properties are selling for and they can make decisions based on that. Do they then go and negotiate it themselves or do they work with a professional that negotiates it on their behalf? That's their decision based on their budget, based on, you know, what they're comfortable with, all of those types of things. But it comes down to the data and then they can go away and make informed decisions. It's not for me to make that decision for them. But what I will do if I'm negotiating it on their behalf is I will do it without the emotions because I'm not emotionally invested in the same way that a buyer would be. So do you in your process, how are you giving the buyer? Talk me through the process a little bit more. Let's say I appoint you as a buying agent. I give you my spec of what I'm looking for. How do you give me the clarity, the information, and the confidence I need to know when we find the property, I make the offer? Take walk me through it a little bit. Make it real for me the process here of you are my buy. Let's say we So, let's make it real. We've just offered for a house in Grantham. Um, we're going through the process. We don't have a buying agent. We're just going through the estate agent traditional process with solisters and conveyances, all that. Let's say before we've done all this, we'd spoken to you, given you our spec. Talk me through it. what happens. So, first things first, we go through a profile. So, we ask a we go through a questionnaire and we make sure that we understand exactly what it is that you're looking for. And it might be a case that there are examples that you can share or properties that you've already found that you So, I spoken to somebody yesterday. You know, she's been searching for two to three years. It's been a while, right? So, but she was able to then show me examples of the type of property that she's been looking for. So there's a couple of cases where she's had her offer accepted and the sales collapsed for issues during the convexing process with planning and so forth and there were others where she just missed out because as she wanted to view them that you know they they'd gone under offer so she got there too late and so she'd been searching for us. So we went through a a questionnaire as to what exactly she was looking for. She was able to provide examples. So I've got a very good idea of the type of property that she is now looking for. So there's a number of options I explained to her. We can look at the options that are on on the market across all of the portals. We can make sure that we're registering with all of the relevant agents in the specific area where you want to buy. There's actually a few areas that she's considering. So, you have to consider the the time constraint element. If you're working a full-time job, it's a lot of agents that you potentially need to register with. They may be in that specific area that you want to buy in, but also outside of that specific area as well because not all it's not always a local agent that has those properties. that could be in nearby towns and so forth depending on who's instructed who. Um so it's a case of do you know looking at all of the agents being first to know by registering with those agents when those properties become available. Um and then also you know doing the the homeowner outreach as I spoke as I spoke about earlier to draw people in but maximizing that make sure they're aware of all of the options that exist for getting options that they can consider for finding that right property. So we go through those. Um and then what we what we will do is we will say like right what do you want to do? Do you want to view these properties yourself? Do you have the capacity to do it yourself? Do you have the time you know sometimes it's a different city, completely different location? It's just not feasible or practical for them to do those viewings. So let them know that we can do all of those initial viewings on their behalf. So they only need to view the property if they want to view the property at all. Believe it or not, some people buy and they don't even view the property, especially if they're overseas, um for example. But normally they would only view it because they're deadly serious about it. They've found a property or we've helped them find a property and we've already done the research on that property. So we can advise them on what we believe the property to be worth based on comparables as I was just talking about. Yeah. And so we can talk about okay where are we going to come in at in terms of offers? What are we what's the maximum we're willing to offer up to? We can go through that whole strategy and we can go away and then negotiate it on their behalf. And once we get to that point in time where the offer has been accepted, we will always look to save them that, you know, as much as we possibly can, get them the best price, get them the best terms based on their circumstances. We also look to understand what the seller's circumstances are because what's the seller's motivations? Why are they selling to begin with? Asking the right kind of questions are key to trying to leverage that position best you can on on behalf of your client. Um, but you you need to find terms that make sense for both parties because the ones that don't, those cells tend to collapse. So, it's a it's a balancing act. Um, but once you've got your offer accepted, it's a case of, okay, do we need do we now need to do a survey? Do you know who a surveyor is? Because we can help them with identifying the surveyor and understanding what type of survey should you do? Should you do a level two? Should you do a level three? Going through that with them. Once the survey has been done, understanding it is a whole different aspect of it because most buyers I know I'm feeling that most buyers don't know how to to to make sense of those reports. They're a red, amber, green kind of a traffic light system and if you see a bunch of red on the first few pages that you look at, you get overwhelmed. It's intimidating, but you don't know what's real and what's not. And some of it is just the surveyor trying to cover themselves from a liability point of view. And other times there are real, you know, issues that you genuinely need to be aware of and that you need to take seriously and you might need to take some course of action to mitigate that risk or it might just be more than you can chew and you might not want to do that but you need to do it based on you know being in a position of of it being informed. So you can move the salon from from from there or withdraw depending on what the situation is but you're informed. um then it's just handholding throughout the life cycle of that conveying scene process and there are numerous issues that can come out but the point is we can you know be there from the beginning all the way to the end and provide them with as much support and as much advice and as much handholding as they need um and and it's very specific to what what they need help with and and what the challenge is in terms of their search. But let me jump in here because I not a lot of people know this. So many people know this because I've told this story several times. I was voted most likely to become a secondhand car salesman at school. Actually did it very on a large scale with auto trader. I had 350,000 cars on my fork. I know from the secondhand car sales world the last thing a car dealer wanted was someone who turned up with the buyer who knew something about cars. How do estate agents feel when they, you know, there's lots of buyers out there. Let's say buyer A turns up and they're basically uninformed on their own and they're basically just going to just buy with their own kind of experience and knowledge. Someone turns up with a Daniel Clark at their side, aren't they a bit like, we are so I was going to say screwed. If I just said said screwed, there we are. It's like Daniel's going to get one over us because he knows more about the process than anyone else. Explain to me how the relationship with estate agents work because you're either you're going to help because you're going to make the process move through much more smoothly or aren't you their worst enemy? No. And and you know what I think anybody you know any agents out there that have the mindset that a buying agent is a competitor in any way I think is completely misunderstood the whole point. Talk to me about that. That's I'm interested in that. Talk to me about that. Right. So so why why is collaboration so successful in Australia and in America for example where you have buying agents and selling agents. Right. If if if they were competitors they'd never do a deal together. So if we just re it back and we focus on our market, an agent is acting in the best interest of their seller. Buying agent is acting in the best interest of their client, the buyer. But why can't you marry the two? So if you've found a happy medium where the seller's happy and the buyer's happy, you've got two professionals acting on both sides that are going to work together to get that sale to complete. And so in my experience, the fall through rate drops dramatically because you've got two professionals working in tandem to get this this deal done. So many properties fall through. Exactly. Right. So what's it I think 28% of sales fall through. I think my fall through rate is about 7%. So like it comes down dramatically. And then not to mention the time it takes to actually complete that sale. It happens so much quicker because there's less procrastination. There's less of this, okay, if you're a first-time buyer, which the majority of buyers are in the market. You know, they don't know what they're doing to be fair to them. They don't have somebody holding their hand. And so naturally, they're finding their way. It's the first time they've done it. It's going to take time, right? especially if it's lease hold or something like that. I mean, you know, it's going to take time. So, if they've got access to a professional that's advising them, but also driving that process forward on their behalf as a buyer rather than it just being the estate agent trying to drive it on their side, from the seller's side, you've got two professionals that know their craft, know what they're doing, that are working together to push it forward. Now, in my experience, that works exceptionally well, and it's significantly better than having a buyer working with an agent because the agent's acting in the interest of their client. The buyer doesn't know what they're doing. They're trying to find their way, and it can all get quite messy. So, it's a lot cleaner having professionals on both sides. It's not it's not a competition. Yes, you might lock horns a little bit when you're doing that initial negotiating piece, but once that's done, it it's it just, you know, moves forward swimmingly. Every everyone knows what they're doing, and it's great. And with, you know, so many agents not selling the property that's listed with them, you know, we got, you know, is it like 52 55% the long-term average of the number of uh properties an agent will sell that they list. Actually, if they find the right buying agent, they've got more chance of selling the listing, haven't they? Because you could bring them people who are really motivated buyers who absolutely want that product because of the property, because of the questionnaire we did at the beginning. Yeah. No, absolutely. And you know what, in in the interest of collaboration, because I don't have any interest in selling properties anymore, like I've been building some really good relationships with really high quality agents. And so, one of the things that I've identified through working with agents, a kind of a small number of agents, is that what what tends to happen on a day-to-day is that the buyers don't call buying agents because they don't know buying agents exist. So, they will call an estate agent and they'll you say, "Look, I want to buy a property in your area. Do you have anything for me?" And a lot of the time they don't. And so they will register them in the database and they will just sit there in that database and they may or may not eventually get instructed on something that meets their criteria. But often that doesn't happen. And that buyer will disappear into the ether and maybe eventually buying a property with another estate agent more often than not. And the estate agents miss the trick because twothirds of sellers are also buyers. Twoirds of buyers are also sellers as you already commented on. And so the agent doesn't ever ask them do you have a property to sell at that initial stage. Now if they say well no we don't have anything that meets your criteria but we do work with home buyer agency as an example. So if we was to work together then they introduce that buyer to us and say they can help you with finding a property. Well then we can help them find that property. It will come out through the conversation that there's a property to be sold. We can also refer back to that agency that's referred the buyer to us to begin with. Win-win, you know. And then if there's a mortgage broker that's involved as well because quite often estate agents work with a mortgage broker, what often happens is the estate agent will lose the opportunity because they don't have an opportunity for that buyer. Buyer will go off elsewhere. Whereas through talking to us, the the lead and the opportunity can still go back to that mortgage broker. So you've created effectively a triangle where everyone's dealing with exactly the same kind of client, but it's mutually beneficial. So that's the kind of example where an estate agent might view a buying agent as a competitor but really they don't have to be. This can be very very collaborative and I think that's the direction that we need to take our industry. I I can't agree with you more. We need more collaboration in the industry. Uh it's so fiercely competitive and actually there's more areas of collaboration there should be rear of competition. Albeit of course competition is good and if you're all calling to see and value a house from an estate state perspective I get that but as an industry we do better to be more collaborative with people who are different parts of different parts of the ecosystem that's out there. So go on dish the dirt Daniel give us the trickiest deal you've helped the buyers secure you know I'm expecting not name names but go on give us a particularly juicy situation you've actually helped in. I think I don't know if I'd say it's the the the most challenging. It might take me a little while to consider what the most challenging one would be, but I did have a you know a recent case. I had an Italian client. He wanted to buy a property and this was as an inheritance to for three kids basically. So he wanted to buy a property in London and he'd been looking he'd been looking for a while before he was introduced to me and you know we viewed a few options. It was a question of lease hold versus freehold, understanding the difference and blah blah blah. But we found a property. It was a new build property and he was really overwhelmed by the whole process. Not not only the Italian, so he's very emotional anyway, right? And I've got a lot of Italian clients, so it's quite a um it's a it's a funny conversation that we often have. But he didn't understand anything about the UK property market. And it is different. It's very different to how things operate over in Italy. So going through all of that, um he he needed a lot of handholding. He needed a lot of explaining. Um but we found a property that he absolutely loved to the point where he didn't think that um he'd be able to have found that property without me despite the fact that actually this was an inbuilt development and so whilst that specific unit wasn't being advertised the development was very widely widely being marketed but he wouldn't have found it himself because it's a case of okay you want to secure an investment where do you want to secure that investment what area is going to make sense for you where are you going to get the right kind of yield like understanding the the end to and what are they trying to achieve and why, what does that really look like for them and then going away and helping them achieve it. It's like solution engineering. Yeah. Um, so I I understood what they were looking for and so I was able to present this property and it was in northwest London and so you know he just didn't even know where to start with it and developer was being really really difficult when it came to negotiating because what they didn't want to do was give the perception that they're willing to negotiate and so if they had dropped the price in any any way there'd be evidence of that and then other buyers would then use that evidence to negotiate the price down once you do it For one, you have to do it for them all, right? Yeah. They were refusing to do that. This was a cash buyer. So, what we had to do was we had to be quite creative in the way that we structured it so that we could get him a discount without it being obvious that we've secured a discount. So, it went for it went for a while with with negotiations. They actually had to go through to to the board um to to get sign off, but we managed to secure £45,000. And the way that we were able to secure £45,000 was worth £45,000 off the price. Correct. Wow. Technic tech. Well, £45,000 was the saving, but it wasn't off of the asking price. We paid asking price. So, we were able to get the developer to maintain their maintain their the perception of value in their units effectively, right? But they they covered our stamp duty bill, right? So behind the scenes the client has saved 45 grand and we basically calculated what the stamp duty would be based upon the fact that if we paid what we wanted to do pay which was below the asking price and what the stamp duty would be based upon that paying asking price meant we actually paid a higher service um stamp duty, right? Um so we calculated what we would have paid a stamp duty. We we calculated what all of our bills would have been and we made sure that they covered all of those costs, right? Agreed it. So, it did take us a couple of weeks to agree it and it took a full week for it to be signed off by the board, but it got agreed. So, we were able to move forward with that. So, they say £45,000. And by the way, that was actually four and a half times more than what the client paid me. So, you know, not only did I do a lot of the running around and hold the sport, there's a lot of value beyond, you know, anything else in the sense that they actually saved more than they paid me. Considerably more than they paid me. Yeah. No, I like Hey, I can I can have you not made a saving, it's worth it if you just don't know the UK market. But then to get a saving that exceeds what you paid. Exactly. I'm kind of really wishing I'd engaged you because I know you and I wish I'd engaged you when I was buying my house anyway. Anyway, I I still can I still could if I wanted to. You You absolutely could. I guess it's I need to speak to a marketing guy about building my my brand awareness, right? That thought. So, um let's stick to this because you want to make short and pointy next questions. Go on then. What are the valuation myths that buyers often believe? I think that buyers spend too much time focusing on what the asking price is. the asking price is kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things and estate agents have got different strategies and it might be you know what there's going to be a lot of interest in this type of property in this area so we're going to strategically price it low and drive the price up the buyer doesn't understand that strategy and they would only understand it if they had done that comparable analysis on the property to see what other properties have been selling for. So understanding the strategy like there's a difference between the estate agents appraisal right and what an actual valuation is and I think that's one of the biggest you know misconceptions for buyers buying a property. So there's market value backed by comparable evidence. Yeah. And then there is the asking price and they are quite often two different things. The asking price is a part of a strategy. what it's actually worth is data backed. Yeah. And they're two different things. So, working with a buying agent will help you to understand what the actual market value is based on comparable evidence and then you can go into negotiate. Then you can maximize your chances of securing a property. All of those kind of things. So, that's what I would say. I love it. So, go on. My final final question for you. Um, if you had one bit of advice to a buyer, what would it be? call a buying agent, you know. I love it. No, no, you leave it there. That I was I was wondering if you'd say that. The best interviews I've ever done. Yeah. Call me is normally the 10 out of 10. You pass the course. So, best bit of advice is call the home buyer agency. Um, and you know, you deal anywhere in the UK. Everywhere in the UK. Anywhere in the UK. Amazing. Okay. Okay. Well, look, any property value, any any property value, whether you're buying cash or with a mortgage is irrelevant. Any buyer, buy to let investment, first-time buyer, home mover, it's irrelevant. Anywhere in the UK, we can help. Daniel, that's been really useful. I am When this ends, I'm going to have a chat with you about the property I'm buying. So, hold that thought. Let's do that. See you later. Take care, Daniel. Cheers, mate. Byebye.