Is a Buyers Agent Worth It?

Sometimes. It depends on the gap between what you know and what the other side knows.

If you have bought in your target street before, you can inspect every Saturday, and you are comfortable holding a number under pressure, that gap is small and you may not need help. If you are buying into an area you do not know well, buying from interstate or overseas, short on time, or stretching to your limit, the gap is wide. That is where the money is won and lost.

The honest test is not whether we can find you a house. It is whether we can stop you paying too much for the wrong one.

Most of it happens after you have found the house, not before.

Finding property is the visible part and the easy part. The work that decides whether you buy well is the rest of it: pricing the property against recorded sales rather than the agent's guide, reading the contract and the strata report properly, understanding what a building report means rather than what its summary says, and then negotiating or bidding on evidence.

We also do the parts nobody enjoys. Chasing agents who do not return calls. Sitting through a fourth inspection of a house you have already decided against. Telling you a property is wrong after you have imagined living in it.

You get both directors on your purchase, start to finish, rather than a junior working from a checklist. There is more on how we work with buyers on the Northern Beaches, and a longer piece on what the job involves day to day.

Often. We will not put a number on it, because nobody honestly can.

You will see firms advertise a multiple of their fee in savings. Treat it with care. Nobody knows what you would have paid without them, because that purchase never happened. It cannot be tested, so we do not claim it.

What we can point to is where the money actually moves. Paying the guide when the recorded sales say the guide is high. Bidding past your limit because the room went quiet. Buying a house with a problem a proper contract review would have found. Any one of those costs more than a fee.

Our fee is fixed and agreed in writing before we start, so it does not grow when the price does. The numbers are on our buyers agent fees page.

More often than this industry admits.

If you have one specific house in mind and you already know the agent selling it, you probably do not need us. If your budget reaches one suburb and one property type, the search is not the hard part. And if you have the time, you enjoy the process, and you can walk away from a house you love, you already have the two things that are hardest to buy.

We would rather tell you that in the first conversation than take a fee and hope. That conversation costs you nothing, and it is the same conversation whether you are buying your first home or your fifth.

If it is worth it, what you are hiring is a firm of independent buyers agents on the Northern Beaches and North Shore.

Who pays us, and therefore whose side we are on.

The selling agent is paid by the seller and is obliged to act in the seller's interest. That is not a criticism, it is the job. But it does mean the person showing you through, writing the price guide and telling you how much interest there is has a duty to somebody else.

We are paid by you and by nobody else. We take no commission, no referral fee and no spotter's fee from selling agents, developers, mortgage brokers, conveyancers or building inspectors. You are entitled to ask any buyers agent that question directly, and to be wary of a vague answer.

It is real, and it is also the most oversold thing in this industry.

About 75% of what we buy was never advertised, so we are not going to tell you it does not exist. But access on its own is worth very little. A quiet listing can be just as overpriced as a public one, and frequently is, precisely because there is no competition to correct the price.

What matters is judgement about which quiet listings are worth your Saturday morning and what they are genuinely worth once you have read the recorded sales. We set out the unvarnished version, including the parts the industry overstates, in our off-market analysis.

Knowing an area and knowing what it has actually sold for are two different things.

Most people know their suburb through the listings they have seen and what a neighbour mentioned. Neither of those is the sale price. We work from recorded sales, which is the only version that is not somebody's opinion.

It also turns on details that are not in any listing. What a house is worth on the Northern Beaches can depend on a bus route, a flood overlay or which side of a ridge it sits on. On the Upper North Shore it can be a heritage conservation area or a tree order that quietly removes the extension you were counting on. On the Lower North Shore it can be a strata fund with a repair bill nobody has budgeted for.

Reading those records before you bid is most of the job.

A fixed fee, agreed in writing before we start, in two parts.

A retainer of $5,500 including GST when we begin, and a success fee agreed with you beforehand and payable only on unconditional exchange. If you do not buy, the success fee is never payable. We do not charge a percentage of what you spend, because that arrangement pays your negotiator more the more you pay.

The full breakdown, including what else you should budget for and what happens if no purchase completes, is on our buyers agent fees page. We work across the Northern Beaches and Sydney's North Shore, and the fee is the same wherever you buy.