What is a home finder?
Home finders are called many things… property search agent, buying agent, relocation agent, home finder, it all comes down to the same thing in one sense, an expert in the residential property market acting on your behalf to find you a property and to help you to buy the property.
Do they all mean the same thing? No
A relocation agent is usually someone who works with corporate entities who are moving employees around and generally they are only expert in finding rental properties. Therefore if you are looking to buy a property, these are generally not the people to give you expert home buying advice.
Property Buying Agents
This is a generic term for property experts specialising in the purchase of a property. However, the term buying agent is often referring to those working at the very top end of the market and they may well have a commercial bent. Therefore looking at purchasing super-prime homes, hotels, shopping centres etc..
Home finders / Property Search Agents
These terms mean pretty much the same. These are experts specialising in buying homes for ordinary and extraordinary people. Invariably they will have a background in estate agency so will bring insider knowledge to the table on your behalf. They may well have a specific geographic area in which they specialise.
Who uses homefinders and why?
Homefinders are quickly becoming a mainstream service in the UK, if you bear in mind that over 95% of people use Estate Agents when selling, then the logic for that becomes apparent. It is often thought that only the ‘rich and famous’ use homefinders, not true. The majority of clients using our services at BDI Homefinders UK are ordinary working folk.
Here are some examples of why people use our homefinder services:
Just too busy
Working full time
Not knowing the area
Wanting expert advice on buying a property
Wanting expert negotiating skills
Just hating the thought of the whole hassle and wanting someone to project manage the home finding process.
At BDI Home Finders our clients fall into the majority of the reasons above. We have helped all sorts of people to move into their new homes from professional sportsmen, accountants, lawyers, teacher’s, overseas investors and even the odd stand-up comedian!
The one thing they have in common is that they recognise that they need help. Finding a new home is extremely labour-intensive not to mention the most expensive investment that most people will make – it is critical to get it right. The vast majority of people would not consider selling without an expert i.e. estate agent, so why would one buy without one?
BDI Home Finder’s fall between all of the above examples. We are an independent homefinder service that’s run by ex-Estate Agents. None of our property search consultants handle more than two clients at any one time, we know from experience that we cannot do the job properly and deliver the best quality service with more clients.
We cover London and most of the South-east of England, so if your remit changes, or if you want to sanity check different areas, we are agile and knowledgeable enough to roll with it.
