Why We Focus on Security, Not Sales

I’m paid by the buyer and by nobody else. No commission from sellers, no fee from estate agents, no referral payment from developers, no cut of a refurbishment budget. One fixed fee, agreed in writing before any work starts, paid in three stages: 10% on instruction, 40% at memorandum of sale, and 50% on completion.

That’s the whole model, and everything else in this article follows from it.

Why the payment structure is the important part

Most people evaluating a sourcer look at the properties. The properties are the output. The incentive is the machine that produced them, and it tells you far more.

If a firm is paid by the seller, it’s paid when the seller’s property is sold. It doesn’t get paid for telling you that property is wrong for you. If a firm takes a commission from a developer, its list of available stock is the developer’s list, whatever it says about independence. If a firm is paid a percentage of the purchase price, every pound it negotiates off costs it money.

None of that makes those firms dishonest. It makes them pulled. Good people under a bad incentive still drift, slowly, in the direction the incentive points. The only reliable defence is to remove the pull.

What my structure does and doesn’t do

My fee is fixed, so negotiating the price down doesn’t reduce what I earn. On Beech Grove that meant taking a property first listed at £125,000 to £90,000, which is 28% below the original asking price. I earned exactly the same as if the client had paid £110,000. There was nothing quietly arguing for the higher number.

The staging matters too. Half the fee arrives only on completion, which means walking away from a deal at week six costs me more than it costs you. I’ve done it. My record is 16 properties sourced at 10 to 20% below market value. Not every deal completes, because nothing is binding in England until exchange, so a vendor can pull out or a survey can turn something up. I say so rather than implying a clean run, because a sourcer who claims a perfect record is either new or editing. The purchases I’ve written up in full, with the numbers, are on the case studies page.

What it doesn’t do is make me cheap. Being paid only by you means you actually pay me, which is more visible than a fee buried in a price you never see. A “free” sourcer isn’t free. The seller pays them, and the seller recovers it in the price, and you’re the one holding the property afterwards. I’d rather the cost were on an invoice you can look at. The stages and what triggers each one are on what it costs.

What I turn down

The clearest evidence of an incentive is what a firm refuses to sell.

• New build and off-plan developer stock. These carry the largest commissions in the industry, which is why so much of what gets marketed to overseas investors is exactly this. I don’t sell it.
• Packaged deals I didn’t source. I don’t resell another sourcer’s deal for a slice. If I haven’t viewed it and checked it, it doesn’t go to you.
• Properties outside my area. I buy in South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire, roughly ten miles around Worksop. I know these streets. If your brief needs Manchester or Birmingham, I’m the wrong firm and I’ll say so on the first call rather than three weeks in.
• Clients I can’t serve well. If your target return isn’t achievable in my patch, the useful answer is no. It’s also the cheapest answer, for both of us.

What “security first” actually means in the work

It isn’t a slogan about caution. It’s a sequence of checks that a property has to survive before you ever hear about it: crime data for the street, flood risk, EPC rating and what it would cost to reach a C, legal title, comparable sales rather than asking prices, and a rent figure that stands up against what is actually let nearby rather than what is advertised.

Most of what I look at fails one of those. You don’t see the failures, and that filtering is the job you’re paying for. Then I go and stand in the property, on video, and show you the damp patch as well as the lounge. The full sequence is on how it works.

Where this leaves you

Ask any firm you’re considering the same question: who pays you, and when? Then ask what they would earn if they told you not to buy. If the second answer is nothing, read their recommendations accordingly.

That question is only the start. There’s a fuller list of what you should demand from any UK sourcer, including the registrations you can check yourself and the insurance you should ask to see, in what is a secure UK property sourcing service. Our own registrations are set out on compliance, and how to choose the right property investment advisor covers the wider selection question.