Henry Pryor, buying agent and well-known property market commentator, has defended a piece he wrote in the Evening Standard encouraging home buyers to be cautious when dealing with estate agents.
Providing top tips for buyers, he is keen to point out that agents are required to do their best for vendors as ultimately they are the paying client.
In a blog, Pryor said: “Some tips that I shared with Homes & Property in the Evening Standard have created a bit of comment but if you’re thinking of buying a property then my advice is to hope for the best but to plan for the worst.
“Estate agents (I’m one, by the way) are not brokers. We are paid by one party to represent their interests and to get the best deal we can. There is some consumer legislation around how agents act when it comes to the counter-party but the role of the agent is to do the best for their client that they can.
“No selling agent has ever said to their client “oh, these buyers have more money, would offer more if we pushed them but they have offered a fair price and we think that you should accept this”. Their job is to squeeze the buyer for their best bid and take it to their client and advise on it’s merits in their professional opinion.
“Not all the suggestions are ways of avoiding being mugged, most buyers are canny enough but some are tips that may lift the process from being one of the most stressful experiences you can have – up their with bereavement and relationship breakdown – to perhaps being closer to the ultimate retail experience. You’re spending thousands of pounds. It ought to be fun and if it isn’t it’s usually because people don’t prepare properly and misunderstand the role of the agent.”
You can read the article, published last week, in full below:
He is also having a go at conveyancers for not explaining to their clients their leasehold repair obligations etc. Which most of them do by the way.
Henry, if your Christmas card count is down this year, I doubt it is due to any rail or postal strike.
Happy Christmas.
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Well Henry, we urge every single Estate Agent in the country to archive/delete you from our databases and never deal with you again.
Maybe he needs to read the book ‘how to lose Friends and alienate people’, as he seems to have pi$$ed off the entire industry with this!
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Not the most sensible press release you’ve ever done, Henry. In promoting your own agenda, you’ve defamed the very people you need to advise you of offline opportunities that make you look connected to your clients. Remedial class for you next year.
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Well done Henry, you have questioned the integrity of agents, mortgage advisors and conveyancers. Yes there are some rouge traders out there, but the majority do a dam good job and by the book.
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“the pot calling the kettle black”.
Very much a twisted outlook of what could go on, doesn’t mean that all reputable agents do. This is nothing but fear mongering for a public platform to raise their own self proclaimed importance. Now I could write comments on so called industry guru’s but you would probably have fallen asleep after 16 hours!
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Well Henry, I will say this on the subject of not using the agents conveyancers. In my experience, 90% of solicitors out there are absolutely useless. Agents in the main (Particularly independent ones) will carefully choose the solicitors or conveyancers they work with, to get the best possible service from them, NOT because they receive referral fees. Conveyancing has never in my 33 years in the industry, been in a worse place than it has today. Average transactions are taking 5 months to go through now, so using a good solicitor will increase the chances of the sale going through more quickly, less chance of the sale aborting, saving all parties money and if they (the solicitors) have been slacking for whatever reason, the agent can kick them up the backside and get them to do what is needed, as they get a lot of work from that agent, so they respond to them. I cannot tell you how many times buyers have come to us halfway through a transaction, wishing they had never instructed their solicitor. As for everything else you say, well it’s nonsense isn’t it Henry. If you went through life not trusting anyone, where would it get you eh? Those buyers will become sellers one day and would want to know they have been treated fairly and given honest good advice (which 99% of agents aim to do). rant over.
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Dave G, some of your response seems logical, but to blame 90% of solicitors (conveyancers) for the long transaction times, is, if it wasn’t so incorrect, almost laughable. You seem to haver no idea how difficult the conveyancers role has become over the last 20 years or so.
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Hi Rob, trust me i do know how difficult it is, but if you saw how much work my team are doing, chasing up solicitors, finding out they have lied when they told us they have done something, when they didn’t, not raising inquiries until the last minute, only to find issues, the list goes on. Of course it’s not every solicitor, but we have tried out so many different ones over the years who promise the earth and dont even deliver half of what they promise.
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If this is true, we need to find out why they feel the need to lie and raise late enquiries. It can’t be by choice, and can’t be because they are all inefficient. Their must be a real underlying cause that is not being addressed.
“they have lied when they told us they have done something, when they didn’t, not raising inquiries until the last minute, only to find issues”
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They are inefficient
The underlying causes are they take on work when they are already overloaded and know they will not be able to act quickly
They send an e mail or write a letter rather than do the simple thing of picking up a phone and communicating like an adult
Conveyancing is not hard – it is just a basic admin job that they turn into a fiasco
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Yes all of the above is also true.
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Only someone who doesn’t do conveyancing would say conveyancing is not hard. Estate Agency must be easy too.
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Movewithus and lifetime legal = more volume and less quality.
I feel for the conveyancers and the pressure they are under.
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Why don’t you join our online forum jan-byers, you could then see some of the compex issues and questions that are raised on a daily basis. In fact, you could probably answer them all and make their lives so much easier.
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Rob, we will never find out. I have found out in the past on quite a few occasions, where BOTH buyer and sellers solicitors have lied, and it’s only through us chasing and doing detective work that we have found this out. I think as someone else has said in this link, they take on too much work when they cannot manage it, they also pass on their work to trainee solicitors who don’t know how to do the job right, then later in the transaction it gets found out they forgot to do something. And I think they tell you things that they know you want to hear to get you off their back, hoping that it wont come back and bite them later on. My firm had a great relationship with a solicitor for a few years and they had probably 100 cases minimum from my me, then suddenly it all started going wrong, she wasn’t answering emails, texts, whatsapp messages and in the end we had to stop using her. A few months later we have had two of my clients sue her for negligence. She took on too much work and it F****d her.
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Tsser
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Henry is in a position of influence and I wish he would use that to talk about so-called “deal sourcers” who pay thousands to attend a property guru course and learn to sell “investments” to consumers.
These people are taught to go onto Rightmove, find properties, and then “package them up” and sell them to investors for a fee.
Their due diligence is negligible and many do not comply with the necessary compliance, such as being a member of an independent redress scheme.
These same students also sell Rent to Rent “deals” and Rent to Rent Serviced Accommodation “deals” to naive and vulnerable people who don’t realise they are buying hot air. I recently helped a young couple get back £18K for three Rent to Rent SA deals which were a complete joke and were not as described. They were the lucky ones.
I hear of significant consumer losses to deal sourcers every week. It’s like the Wild West.
I expect many agents on here get the calls all the time with someone reading a script about how they are a cash buyer and looking for a discount. They later reveal that they are actually an intermediary and are in no position to buy the property themselves. They must waste many hours of estate agents’ time.
Most of these deal sourcers are an absolute scourge but nothing is being done about them. Henry should be promoting using reputable agents and how to do due diligence, rather than undermining an entire sector that goes some way to protecting consumers from rogues.
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Thanks Henry. I’ll add to your list. Never trust an estate agent who defames other estate agents. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
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As the old Chinese proverb states: “He who throws muck gets dirty hands”
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Henry,
I’m late to this party but you told the truth and nothing more or less.
Everything in the article is logical.
The chasm between ‘recommending’ a conveyancer and ‘promoting’ is a lie. A bare faced lie.
Ad the rest of your article simply advises people to make their own choices, do their own research and take control over their house hunting destiny.
Theres sweet FA wrong with the advice.
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