What Is a Buyer's Agent?
Everyone in a property transaction is paid by somebody. Work out who pays whom and most of the advice you have been given starts to make sense.
A buyer’s agent is a property professional who works for the buyer and nobody else. They search the market, view properties in person, run the due diligence and negotiate the purchase price on your side of the table. You pay them. The seller doesn’t. That one fact is what separates their advice from an estate agent’s.
The term is far more common in Australia and the United States than it is here. In the UK most people have only ever dealt with estate agents, and most people quietly assume the agent showing them round the house is helping them buy it. They aren’t. They’re helping somebody sell it.
Buyer’s agent vs estate agent: who works for whom
An estate agent is instructed by the seller, paid by the seller, and acting for the seller. A buyer’s agent is instructed by you, paid by you, and acting for you. Same market, same properties, opposite sides of the table.
| Estate agent | Buyer’s agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Who instructs them | The seller | You, the buyer |
| Who pays them | The seller, commonly 1 to 2% of the sale price plus VAT | You, on terms agreed before any work starts |
| What the fee does to price | A higher sale price pays them more | Bullseye’s fee is fixed, so a lower price costs them nothing |
| What you get shown | Only what is on their own books | Agents, auction, off market and direct to vendor |
| Viewings | You travel to them | Attended in person on your behalf, with video and notes |
| Due diligence | Yours to do | Crime, flood, EPC, title, comparables, realistic rent |
| Interest after completion | None | The whole point of the exercise |
Run the arithmetic on the incentive. On a house listed at £125,000 with the agent on 1.25% plus VAT, the agent earns £1,875. Push the price up by £10,000 and they earn £150 more. Knock £10,000 off for the buyer and they earn £150 less.
That isn’t corruption. That’s the contract they signed. The estate agent isn’t the villain in this story, they’re just very obviously not your representative, and the trouble starts when a buyer forgets it.
Who pays a buyer’s agent, and why it changes the advice
You pay them, directly, and that’s the mechanism that makes the advice usable. Bullseye Properties Ltd is a buyer’s agent based in South Yorkshire, working exclusively for investors buying across South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands. No commission from vendors. No referral payment from selling agents. No spread on the price.
The fee is fixed, agreed in writing before any work starts, and staged: 10% on instruction, 40% at memorandum of sale, 50% on completion. Nine tenths of it depends on actually delivering a property you chose to buy. The full model is on what it costs.
The staging matters less than the fixed part. Plenty of buying agents charge a percentage of the purchase price instead, and it sounds fair right up until you think about it. A sourcer on 2% of a £90,000 purchase earns £1,800. If they negotiate £19,500 off the asking price for you, their own fee drops by £390. Nobody says out loud that they’d rather you paid more. They don’t have to. The pull is quiet: slightly less appetite for a second round of negotiation, slightly more talk about how competitive the market is.
If you take one thing from this page, take this question and ask it of every sourcer, buying agent and estate agent you speak to: who else is paying you on this transaction?
What does a buyer’s agent actually do?
Eight things, roughly in this order. The search is the part everyone pictures and the smallest part of the job.
- Agree written buying criteria: area, budget, strategy, the return you need, the things you won’t accept
- Search estate agents, auction catalogues, off market stock and direct to vendor approaches
- Reject most of it, which is the actual service
- View in person, film a full walkthrough, write honest notes including the damp patch
- Run due diligence: crime, flood risk, EPC and the realistic route to a C, title, comparable sales, achievable rent
- Build the full cost model and tell you if the deal doesn’t stack up
- Negotiate the price on your side only
- Progress solicitors, brokers and surveys through to completion, then hand over
Bullseye Properties has sourced 16 properties for investors at 10 to 20% below market value, with a best single discount of 28% off the original asking price and a fastest conveyance of six weeks. The full process is set out on how it works, and four purchases are published with the actual numbers in the case studies.
Is a buyer’s agent the same as a property sourcer?
Mostly, in the UK, the terms overlap. The distinction worth caring about isn’t the label, it’s whether the person is retained by you or is selling a deal to a list.
A deal packager finds a property, ties it up, then markets it to everybody on their mailing list at a fixed fee. You’re one of forty people looking at the same email. The deal was found first and the buyer second, which means nobody checked whether it suits your goals, because your goals weren’t in the room when it was sourced.
A buyer’s agent works the other way round. The brief comes first. The property is found to fit it.
The warning sign in either model is the same: somebody taking a fee from you and a commission from the vendor on the same transaction. Ask. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
What a buyer’s agent can’t do
This is the part most pages skip, so here it is before the good bit.
They can’t stop a purchase collapsing. Nothing is binding in England and Wales until exchange of contracts, so a seller can walk away at any point before it, and they do. They can’t guarantee capital growth, because nobody can. In the areas Bullseye targets, historic House Price Index growth of 4 to 6% a year is the working assumption, not a promise, and the highest yielding streets in the region often sit closer to 1%.
They can’t give you tax or legal advice. Stamp duty, ownership structure and inheritance planning belong to a solicitor and an accountant, and any sourcer who tells you otherwise is exceeding their competence.
And they can’t make a bad street good. If the numbers only work because the rent assumption is optimistic, no amount of negotiation fixes that.
Do I still need a solicitor, broker and surveyor?
Yes, all three, and none of them are replaced by a buyer’s agent. The solicitor does the conveyancing and the searches, the broker arranges the lending, the surveyor inspects the building and reports to you. A buyer’s agent coordinates them and chases them, which is where the six week conveyance came from, but the professional duty stays with each of them.
Budget for those separately. On a £90,000 buy to let, conveyancing plus searches typically runs £1,400 to £2,200, a Level 2 survey £400 to £900, and a broker fee anywhere from nothing to around £995. Those are paid to those people, not to your agent. The full stack is broken down in what costs are involved in buying an investment property.
What this means for you
If you’re buying one house to live in, you may not need any of this. If you’re buying an asset that has to produce a return for the next twenty years, the question is narrower: is there anybody in this transaction whose money depends on you buying well rather than simply buying?
Right now, in most purchases, the answer is no. The honest case for hiring one, and against goes through when it’s worth the fee and when it isn’t.
Connor, Bullseye Properties Ltd